@Chrispminis:
I'll try to respond... and try to restate.
Pai and pleasure being innate, it STILL is an experience actually... experiencing them. Forming the associative connections, as you said.
Meal time with mom may be instinctual, but experiencing still adds to your accumulated being... and, to be cruel but put it another way, the abscence of such a thing, then the abscence of mom for feeding time, that will have an impact.
I acknowledged the episodic memory not being functional early on for the baby...
Still, by experiencing, it builds, even early on. Again, perhaps its easiest to look at the negative scenario:
Baby Oedipus is left alone, abandoned. It instinctually knows its meal time with mother, maybe, but as she's not there, no one to feed him and no comforting presence, it is a cause of distress, perhaps even the discovery of distress, Oedipus being so young as a baby, maybe this is his first brush with a bad, truly bad experience, and there are plenty here- abandonment, association (or in his case lack thereof) wioth human beings, food...
I'm probably not being th most coherent I've ever been, long day, but I hope my general point is being commuted, that even before the episodic memory empirically the child cna still be shaped by what is- or isn't- there.