What is your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you watched a television program? Adults seldom call back events much earlier than the year or so before entering school, just as children younger than three or four seldom remember any specific, personal experiences. A variety of explanations have been suggested by psychologists   for this "childhood amnesia". Now Annette Simms, a psychologist of Riverdale University, offers a new explanation for childhood amnesia. According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else's spoken description of their personal experiences in order to turn their own short-term, fast forgotten impressions of them into long-term memories. In other words, children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about them. Without this verbal reinforcement  , children cannot form permanent memories of what they have experienced. So why should personal memories depend so heavily on hearing them described? Dr. Simms presents evidence that the human mind organizes memories in that way. Children whose mothers talk with them about the day's activities before bedtime tend to remember more of the day's special event than those whose mothers don't. Talking about an event in this way helps a child to remember it. And learning to organize memories as a continuous story is the key to a permanent mental "autobiography  " of important life events. Dr. Simms suggests that we humans may be biologically programmed to turn our life experiences into a novel. The key to creating this mental life story is language, says Dr. Simms. "Children learn to talk about the past," she says. "Talking to others about their short-term memories of the past leads to the establishment   of long-term memories." One way it does this is by helping a child to recognize that the retelling of an experience is just the experience itself, recreated in the form of words. The child learns that this "word-description" of an experience can then be stored in the memory and called back at any time. But a child's language skills are usually not ready for this until the age of three or four, so they have no way to remember the earliest of their experiences. According to Dr. Simms, the reason why children don't form long-term memories before the age of three is that children   _  .
can't call back their experiences have nowhere to store the memories haven't developed enough language skills confuse the memory with the experience itself