ICYMI: Memory Study in Babies Hints at New Explanation for ‘Infantile Amnesia’

Researcher and professor Nick Turk-Browne (left) prepares a child participant and parent for an infant MRI study in the Brain Imaging Center (now BrainWorks) at Yale University circa 2021.

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Most of us lack any true memories from our own babyhood, or even from our early childhood. In a new study, researchers suggest this incapacity to retrieve our earliest memories, or “infantile amnesia,” may not be caused by babies’ inability to form memories, but instead by adults’ inability to recall the memories they did in fact store during infancy.

Researchers observed the brains of infants between the ages of four and 25 months during a memory test using fMRI. Getting babies to sit still is a famously difficult task, but the researchers managed to make them comfortable enough to lay in the fMRI scanner and look at a series of images on a screen. At the same time, they measured brain activity in the infants’ hippocampi. Among babies older than a year, they found the level of hippocampal activity during the first viewing of an image corresponded to the amount of time the infants spent looking at the same image a second time. This suggests the hippocampus — crucial for memory formation among adults — plays a role in encoding infants’ abilities to form episodic memories, or memories pertaining to specific past events, earlier in development than previously thought.

Big Picture: Scientists still don’t know how long memories last among infants, or why those memories are inaccessible to people in adulthood. For the next installment of their research, this team is working with parents who are regularly recording videos from the perspective of their kids. The researchers will later show those videos to the child participants to determine whether they can tell which clips are from their own lives or from that of another child, according to Science.

Read More: ‘Pioneering’ study scans babies’ brains as they form memories. Science

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About the Author

Bella Isaacs-Thomas

Bella is the Staff Writer and Editor for BrainFacts. She previously worked as a digital science reporter at PBS NewsHour, where she was named a fellow in the 2022-2023 class of the National Science-Health-Environment Reporting Fellowships (SHERF) and earned a 2021 D.C. Science Writers Association Newsbrief Award for writing. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in 2018.