Perceived first memories are often fictional ones

Researchers at City, University of London, the University of Bradford and Nottingham Trent University have surveyed over 6,000 people about their first memory. 38.6% recalled their first memory from the age of two years or less and 13.5% put that memory within the first year of their life. Interestingly previous research suggests that the earliest memories cannot be formed until we are around the age of 3 plus years.
The assumption is that recollections of memories earlier than research deems possible are ‘fictional memories’ that are a mental picture of part of an early experience, object or emotion, coupled with something that we factually know about our early life, rather than an actual memory.
First author Dr Shazia Akhtar said: “We suggest that what a rememberer has in mind when recalling fictional improbably early memories is an episodic-memory-like mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own infancy/childhood. Additionally, further details may be non-consciously inferred or added, e.g. that one was wearing nappy when standing in the cot. Such episodic-memory-like mental representations come, over time, to be recollectively experienced when they come to mind and so for the individual they quite simply are ‘memories’ which particularly point to infancy.”
Co-author of the paper, Professor Martin Conway said: “In our study we asked people to recall the very first memory that they actually remembered, asking them to be sure that it wasn’t related to a family story or photograph. When we looked through the responses from participants we found that a lot of these first ‘memories’ were frequently related to infancy, and a typical example would be a memory based around a pram. For this person, this type of memory could have resulted from someone saying something like ‘mother had a large green pram’. The person then imagines what it would have looked like. Over time these fragments then becomes a memory and often the person will start to add things in such as a string of toys along the top. Crucially, the person remembering them doesn’t know this is fictional. In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don’t believe it. This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it’s not until we’re five or six that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world.”