Development Of Child Event Memory

Because of their biological organisation, infants do have some perceptual understanding of their earliest sensations. Newborns can track a moving object with their eyes and orient themselves in the direction of a sound. In a limited way newborns can innately engage in selective attention. Soon after birth infants actively attend thus beginning the process of encoding information from the environment and placing it in their memories for later retrieval.

Children first learn to use specific memory strategies as young as 2 years of age. At that time they engage in simple strategies to remember the existence of a hidden object such as pointing toward where they last saw it. Such behaviour can be seen as evidence of a very early attempt to retain what must be remembered.

Mature strategy efforts appear when children are about 10 years of age.