Even a century after Freud's theories of repressed memories, researchers have not pinned down a precise explanation for why childhood amnesia occurs.
Research of children's memory capabilities, rather than that of adults', just began during the past 20 years. The research has yielded a batch of new questions regarding the nuances of young children's memory.
The rationale behind childhood amnesia for quite some time had rested on the assumption that babies had not yet developed the memory-making part of their brains. The thinking was that around age 3, children's capabilities quickly accelerated to adult levels.