And those are the ones I know (or, well, knew) who still remember college times. Some still likened back to their high school years.
In other words, that whole anecdotes not necessarily being data thing. This study seems to show by and large there is something significant around the 7 year mark. Are there similar studies on other years?
> And those are the ones I know (or, well, knew) who still remember college times. Some still likened back to their high school years.
I don't understand the relevance of this. There is no conflict between remembering swathes of your college and high school years, and forgetting other swathes. It covers a lot of time (and your 20s cover even more than that); there's plenty of room to forget large parts of it while remembering others.
I know far more people who have no reliable memory of pre 7 than I do of any that have no reliable memory of their 20s.
Now, you seem to be saying it is simply a matter of the age of the memory. But you are completely disregarding the study, which shows that children around the age of 8 have a massive dropoff in what they can remember from a scant 2 years ago. This isn't a case of 2 years being a significant time. Indeed, they went out of their way to show that at age 6 they had a high recollection of things 2 years prior.
If there are studies on this at other ages, I'm interested. But the dismissive "older memories of course are lost" seems somewhat rude. Do you have specific questions with their techniques on how they established 7 as a significant age? Do you just think there would be other significant ages, as well?
> But you are completely disregarding the study, which shows that children around the age of 8 have a massive dropoff in what they can remember from a scant 2 years ago.
> Indeed, they went out of their way to show that at age 6 they had a high recollection of things 2 years prior.
You have misread something. The study does not make reference to any 6-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, being tested for recall of events 2 years prior. The events tested always occurred at age three; they are comparing 5-year-olds' recall of events two years prior to 6-year-olds' recall of events three years prior to 7-year-olds' recall of events four years prior to 8-year-olds' recall of events five years prior to 9-year-olds' recall of events six years prior.
Furthermore, I specifically didn't say it's a matter of the age of the memory. If I had meant that, I would have said something like "memories fade with time". What I did say was "memories fade with disuse". If you exercise a memory (whether a true one or a false one), it will become stronger. If you don't, you will lose it.
Indeed, it looks like I misread a few things and then just got confused. Apologies on that.
Back to the specifics of this article. This study was more about whether conversational differences in discussing memories related to their retention. It appears they have some evidence that this could be the case. And note, they specifically looked at how it was discussed. All memories were discussed.
