Brain Scans Suggest Babies Remember More Than We Thought

Why do we have difficulty recalling specific events from the early years when our brains were working hard to learn so much? A new study from Yale reveals that babies do indeed form memories, but they may not be able to retrieve them.

Infantile Amnesia and Its Causes

When trying to recall your earliest memory, it’s likely that you won’t remember anything before the age of three. Scientists refer to the lack of memory from this critical period as “infantile amnesia,” though the exact cause remains uncertain. One common theory suggests that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory, is not fully developed during this stage, making it difficult to store memories.

A new Yale study tested this idea by developing a memory test for infants. Researchers placed 26 children, aged four months to two years, in an fMRI scanner to monitor their brain activity while they looked at a series of unfamiliar images, including faces, objects, and scenes. Eventually, one of the images would reappear.

Link Between Brain Activity and Memory Recognition

When babies have seen something once before, we expect them to focus on it more when they see it again, said Nick Turk-Browne, senior author of the study. So, in this task, if an infant looks longer at the image they’ve seen before compared to the new one, we interpret that as the baby recognizing it.

The researchers discovered an intriguing link between brain activity and memory behavior. Babies tended to focus longer on the repeated image if their hippocampus showed strong activity when they first saw it. This suggests that the brain encoded the image better as a memory, preparing the baby to recognize it later.

This pattern was consistent across all 26 infants in the study, but it was most noticeable in the group older than 12 months. This indicates that memory development begins earlier than we might have thought, but becomes more pronounced around a child’s first birthday.

Most importantly, the study focused on episodic memory—the ability to recall specific events. This type of memory is considered a more advanced form, typically developing later, which explains why we experience infantile amnesia. During infancy, critical learning occurs through statistical learning, a form of memory that captures general patterns from our experiences.

Statistical learning is about extracting the structure from the world around us, explained Turk-Browne. “This is essential for developing language, vision, and concepts, so it makes sense that it emerges earlier than episodic memory.

Brain Activity in Different Areas for Different Types of Memory

Both statistical learning and episodic memory occur in the hippocampus but in different regions. The fMRI scans in this study showed brain activity toward the back of the head, an area linked to episodic memory.

If we start storing memories earlier than expected, why can’t we remember them? The researchers suggest that these early memories may not convert into long-term memories, causing them to fade as we reach puberty. Another possibility is that the memories are still stored, but we’ve lost the framework to access them. Determining the exact reason will require further research.

We’re working to track the persistence of hippocampal memories throughout childhood and even exploring the possibility that they may persist into adulthood in some form, even if they remain inaccessible, said Turk-Browne.

Read the original article on: New Atlas

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