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 as young as one year old can form memories, according to findings published today in Science 1 published brain scanning study show. The findings suggest that childhood amnesia - the inability to remember the first few years of life - is likely caused by difficulties retrieving memories rather than forming them.

“One really intriguing possibility is that the memories are actually still there in adulthood, but we can't recall them,” says Tristan Yates, co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York.

The secret of memory

Despite their best efforts, adults cannot remember events from their earliest months or years. But whether this is because the hippocampus area, which is crucial for storing such memories, is not sufficiently developed in babies or whether adults simply cannot recall these memories has long been an open question.

To shed light on the matter, Yates and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 26 young children, ages 4 months to 2 years, as they completed a memory task.

The team measured hippocampal activity when the children looked at a picture of a new face, object or scene for 2 seconds, and when they were shown the same picture again about a minute later.

The results showed that higher hippocampal activity when viewing a new image was correlated with longer viewing time of the image when presented again. Since babies tend to spend more time on familiar things, this result suggests that they were able to remember what they saw.

The researchers recorded the strongest encoding activity in the back of the hippocampus - the area most strongly associated with memory retrieval in adults.

“What this study shows is evidence that the coding ability actually exists,” says Nick Turk-Browne, co-author of the study and a cognitive psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

"Although we saw this phenomenon in all infants in our study, the signal was stronger in those over 12 months old, suggesting some sort of developmental progression for the hippocampus' ability to encode individual memories," Yates added.

1. Yates, T.S. et al. Science 387, 1316–1320 (2025).

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2. Travaglia, A., Bisaz, R., Sweet, E. S., Blitzer, R. D. & Alberini, C. M. Nature Neurosci. 19, 1225–1233 (2016).

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