At first infants made random movements, but then came to realize that by kicking they could make the mobile shake. A ribbon was tied to one foot and the other end to a mobile. The infants were placed in their crib, on their backs. Three-month-old infants were taught that they could make a mobile hung over their crib shake by kicking their legs.
However, in a series of clever studies Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues have demonstrated that infants can remember events from their life, even if these memories are short- lived. Finally, social theorists argue that episodic memories of personal experiences may hinge on an understanding of “self”, something that is clearly lacking in infants and young toddlers. Moreover, even if infants do form such early memories, older children and adults may not be able to access them because they may be employing very different, more linguistically based, retrieval cues than infants used when forming the memory.
From the cognitive perspective, it has been suggested that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events thereby, reducing their ability to encode memory. From the biological perspective, it has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the immaturity of the infant brain, especially those areas that are crucial to the formation of autobiographical memory, such as the hippocampus. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this amnesia. As a result, older children and adults experience infantile amnesia, the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. Memory requires a certain degree of brain maturation, so it should not be surprising that infant memory is rather fleeting and fragile.