Babies can form memories - why can't we remember our earliest years?
Babies can form memories - why can't we remember our earliest years?
Babies from the age of one year can form memories of how the results of a science 1 published brain scanning study. The findings suggest that the child's amnesia - the inability to remember the first years of life - is probably caused by difficulties when calling memories and not by their education.
"A really fascinating option is that the memories are actually still available in adulthood, but we cannot call them up," says Tristan Yates, co -author of the study and neuroscience at Columbia University in New York.
The secret of memory
Despite all efforts, adults cannot remember events from their earliest months or years. But whether this is due to the fact that the hippocampus area, which is crucial for the storage of such memories, is not sufficiently developed for babies or whether adults simply cannot call up these memories was an open question for a long time.
To get light into the dark, used yates and their colleagues Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to scan the brains of 26 small children aged 4 months to 2 years who did a memory.
The team measured the activity of the hippocampus when the children looked at a picture of a new face, object or a scene for 2 seconds, and when the same picture was shown again about a minute later.
The results showed that a higher activity of the hippocampus correlated when looking at a new image with a longer viewing time of the image during the presentation. Since babies tend to spend more time with familiar things, this result suggests that they could remember what they are seen.
The researchers registered the strongest coding activity in the back of the hippocampus - the area that is most associated with the access of memories in adults.
"What this study shows is proof that the ability to coden actually exists," says Nick Turk-Browne, co-author of the study and cognitive psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
"Although we saw this phenomenon in all infants in our study, the signal for the more than 12 months old children was more, which indicates a kind of developmental course for the ability of the hippocampus to encode individual memories," adds Yates.
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Yates, T. S. et al. Science 387, 1316–1320 (2025).
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Travaglia, A., Bisaz, R., Sweet, E. S., Blitzer, R. D. & Alberini, C. M. Nature Neurosci. 19, 1225–1233 (2016).