ic knowledge that a volunteer has accumulated over the course of their life. Loftus, (1993) suggested that early childhood memories are greatly influenced by ones amassed, family knowledge. For example, a participant who knows that his or her cousin was closely involved in their upbringing is likely to guess that he or she was present at an important event without any actual memory of the fact. Contributing factors to this are family stories, photographs, home movies, etc. The variance of memories between participants also makes it hard to convert what is reported into significant terms. For example, my earliest memory is from when I was about four years old and my grandmother gave me a piece of amethyst in a wooden quart basket similar to one you buy berries in. This information given its degree of accuracy is quite difficult to generalize since every other person will recount a unique story. A method used by experimenters to compensate for this is the targeting of a specific, datable event common to many individuals. In the 1993 experiment by Usher and Neisser, these target events consisted of the birth of a younger sibling, a hospitalization, the death of a family member and a family move. The use of targeted recall has helped solve one problem with infantile amnesic research but as we will see there are still many problems with the experimental evidence that has been gathered. Experimental Evidence:Usher and Neisser conducted one of the most influential studies in the field of childhood amnesia in 1993. The purpose of this experiment was to improve on the self-report studies done in the past and to examine the relationship between the nature of the events and the age at which they can be remembered. They used a specific questioning method in a between-groups study of adults memories relating to each of the four aforementioned target events. They found that the earliest age that these events could be recalled was two for ...
