Time - Why You Can’t Remember Being a Toddler

Why do our memories rarely reach back before the age of three? Sarah Power explains how a specially designed laboratory setting helps her uncover how memories form in early childhood.

Why do our memories usually only go back to our third year of life? In the Time article, Sarah Power, a researcher at the Center for Lifespan Psychology, describes her approach to investigating how memories are formed in early childhood. For her research, she created a unique experimental room in which children encountered experiences that did not exist outside the laboratory. It was important to her that the elements only existed inside the lab, so that if the children did remember these experiences, it would be because they had been in the lab.

Full article: Time | 23.02.2026