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Fictional first memories
Akhtar, Shazia Justice, L.V. Morrison, Catriona M. Conway, M.A.
Akhtar, Shazia
Justice, L.V.
Morrison, Catriona M.
Conway, M.A.
Publication Date
2018
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2018-04-22
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Abstract
In a large-scale survey, 6,641 respondents provided descriptions of their first memory and their age when they
encoded that memory, and they completed various memory judgments and ratings. In good agreement with many
other studies, where mean age at encoding of earliest memories is usually found to fall somewhere in the first half of
the 3rd year of life, the mean age at encoding here was 3.2 years. The established view is that the distribution around
mean age at encoding is truncated, with very few or no memories dating to the preverbal period, that is, below about
2 years of age. However, we found that 2,487 first memories (nearly 40% of the entire sample) dated to an age at
encoding of 2 years and younger, with 893 dating to 1 year and younger. We discuss how such improbable, fictional
first memories could have arisen and contrast them with more probable first memories, those with an age at encoding
of 3 years and older.
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Accepted manuscript
Citation
Akhtar S, Justice LV, Morrison, CM et al (2018) Fictional first memories. Psychological Science. 29(10): 1612-1619.
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Article