Via BPS Digest I discovered new research that shows that three-year-olds do seem to remember a person they met once at age one.
“The key test was whether the three-year-olds would show a preference for looking at one video rather than the other. Amazingly, the children spent significantly more time looking at the video that featured the researcher they’d never met. This is not due to the children having a bias for either the white or black man, because for some of these children the previously unseen researcher was Scandinavian-African and for others he was Scandinavian-Caucasian. All background features and behaviours in the videos were identical, so this result provides strong evidence that the children had some recognition of the researcher they’d met, and were drawn more strongly to look at the unfamiliar researcher.”
When asked questions about the person, they were guessing at the same rate as the children in the control group, so the memory is probably ‘implicit’. Still, I’m pretty amazed.