licit memory begins to evolve. Procedural learning and conditioned learning emerge very early and can be seen in newborn babies. The prefrontal lobe of the brain starts to become more adultlike in the second year of life and this is when we see the commencement of working memory. Nelson (1995 & 1993) suggested that working memory must have been functioning for long term memories to be stored accurately. However if the cause of childhood amnesia is the underdevelopment of the brain, then we would expect that a three-year-old child would not remember anything from six months to one year prior. Howe and Courage (1993 & 1997) collected evidence to the contrary. They found that children of this age could consistently and accurately remember events that had occurred for up to one year in the past. These findings are also consistent with the data from the Fivush and Schwarzmueller 1998 study that illustrates that children remember childhood events better than when they are adults even when a normal forgetting curve is used to compensate for the extended time interval. In response to this and other evidence some psychologists have proposed that childhood amnesia is effected more by retrieval failure than by storage failure.Howe and Courage (1997) suggest one possible explanation for the failure to retrieve childhood memories. It states that the schemata used to evaluate a situation and thus what you will remember about it, changes so drastically from childhood into adulthood, that the earlier memories no longer fit with ones present knowledge. In other words, what you may remember does not fit your adult schema thus does not make sense and so it is not integrated with what you now call memory. We can deduce much of this logically. Children remember differently than adults. For example, a child may remember the spicy onion on his or her hotdog at a baseball game rather than the game winning, grand slam homerun. Eventually, these pr...
