A groundbreaking study published in Science has shed new light on why humans struggle to recall memories from infancy, despite forming them at an early age. Researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in awake infants engaged in memory tasks, revealing that while babies can encode memories, their ability to retrieve them later is hindered by underdeveloped retrieval mechanisms.
The study explored infantile amnesia the phenomenon where early childhood memories fade from recollection. While most people cannot recall experiences before the age of three, the research suggests that this may not be due to a lack of memory formation but rather the brain’s inability to retrieve them later in life.
A total of 26 infants participated in the study, with researchers facing a major challenge keeping them still in the fMRI machine. To overcome this, scientists used pacifiers, blankets, and psychedelic background patterns to keep the babies engaged. By analyzing brain activity, they found that the hippocampus responsible for episodic memory was active in memory encoding from as early as one year old. However, since this brain region is not fully developed in infancy, retrieval remains a challenge.
Nick Turk-Browne psychology professor at Yale and senior author of the study “Our study shows that infants have the capacity to encode episodic memories in the hippocampus starting around one year of age”.
Researchers are now conducting further studies to see if infants toddlers and children can recognize video clips recorded from their own perspective as babies.
