Originally posted by Guv
Kzin: Your following remark is fascinating to me.I often see off the wall opinions expressed as facts, but I trust you on this one. The jargon sounds good, and the concept is certainly consistent with my own experience.
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The phenomenon is called infantile amnesia and the mechanism was first proposed by Lynn Nadel and Jake Jacobs. It was written up in the journal Nature fairly recently.

I'm not au fait with the developmental literature on consciousness and the issue is rather blurred by the fact that just because something is driven 'instinctively' does not mean that we are not self-aware. Spinal reflex are fine for "knee-jerks" and amphibians but I'm pretty sure almost everything else that we describe as 'instinctive' is at least brainstem mediated.

I'll have a look at the functional imaging literature sometime (MRI but not PET I'd guess for that age group) to see when frontal lobe activity starts - but until I get around to that I'll just spin some anecdotal stuff and say that certainly my older daughter looked and behaved conscious at birth (the midwife said that it was 'intimidating') and had relatively sophisticated internal spacial representations when she was six months old (thus completely defeating the health visitor's dumb "sensory" checks). Within physical limits they seemed very self aware at that stage - just waiting to be able to physically do thing I've noticed this is not the case with all babies - and the 'passive/non-sentient' ones are easier to manage. My two year old is certainly consciousness and articulate in an 'adult' sense (you should hear the complaints I've just been getting about upgrading 'her' computer) but from my experience with the older one I think that she will still only remember memories continually re-inforced until she is over three.