I happen to be extremely nearsighted, and nobody figured that out until I was 8 years old, so that visual memory test thing they did wouldn’t have worked well for me.
With that said, my very first memory is actually a smell, from about age 2.
What was that smell? Marijuana, no joke.
You’d want to forget too, if you shit your pants 6 times a day.
Shit and piss yourself all the time, regularly throw up after meals, various drastic body growth that causes confusing pain, random break down uncontrollable crying sessions… It’s entirely possible that being a baby is traumatic and we block it out
Im guessing indexing. You don’t know enough of the context of the memories to create a good association and a complete reconstruction of the memory. So there is some very simple recall for hyper detailed things like the structure on my parents first couch. But nothing more complete.