You didn't forget your first years of life — your brain overwrote them while building itself. Where do people here land on the neurogenesis account of infantile amnesia?
The memories were there. Infants encode and retain them fine — Rovee-Collier's mobile-conjugate-reinforcement work settled that decades ago. So infantile amnesia isn't a failure to record. It's erasure after the fact.
Frankland & Josselyn (2014, Science) put a mechanism to it: the high rate of hippocampal neurogenesis in early life disrupts existing engrams as new neurons integrate. It's bidirectional in their mouse models — raise neurogenesis and you accelerate forgetting, suppress it and memories persist longer. The thing building the brain is the thing dismantling the memories.
What I find genuinely unresolved is how much explanatory weight that mechanism should carry against the other two accounts: Howe & Courage's argument that autobiographical memory can't form before a stable self-concept exists, and Nelson's view of language as the scaffolding that makes memories durable and retrievable.
So which is doing the real work — the neurons, the self, or the words? Or is "infantile amnesia" just a single label sitting on top of three separate processes that happen to overlap in time?
Curious where this sub comes down, especially anyone working in developmental memory.