Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember being a baby? This blank space in our memory, known as “infantile amnesia,” has puzzled scientists for years. Most of us can’t recall anything before age three or four. Until recently, researchers thought baby brains simply couldn’t form memories yet, that the memory-making part of our brain (the hippocampus) wasn’t developed enough.
But it turns out babies might remember more than we thought. Research just published in the journal Science shows that babies as young as one year old can actually form memories in their hippocampus. The study, led by researchers at various American universities, suggests our earliest memories aren’t missing, we just can’t access them later.
How Do You Study Memory in Babies Who Can’t Talk?
You can’t exactly ask a baby, “Do you remember this?” The researchers came up with a clever solution. They showed 26 babies (ages 4 months to 2 years) pictures of faces, objects, and scenes while scanning their brains. Later, they showed each baby two pictures side by side, one they’d seen before and one new one, and tracked where the babies looked.
“When babies have seen something just once before, we expect them to look at it more when they see it again,” says lead study author Nick Turk-Browne from Yale University, in a statement. “So in this task, if an infant stares at the previously seen image more than the new one next to it, that can be interpreted as the baby recognizing it as familiar.”
Getting babies to lie still in a brain scanner is no small feat. The research team has spent years developing special techniques to make this possible. They made the babies comfortable and only scanned them when they were naturally awake and content.
The Big One-Year Memory Milestone
The brain scans showed that when a baby’s hippocampus was more active while seeing a picture for the first time, they were more likely to stare at that same picture later, showing they may have remembered it.
This ability to remember showed a clear age pattern. Babies younger than 12 months didn’t show consistent memory signals in their brains, but the older babies did. And the specific part of the hippocampus that lit up, the back portion, is the same area adults use for episodic memories.
The researchers had previously discovered that even younger babies (as young as three months) can do a different kind of memory called “statistical learning.” This is basically spotting patterns across experiences rather than remembering specific events.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/cant-remember-first-years-of-life/
