A groundbreaking new study is challenging what we’ve always assumed about memory development in babies. Researchers using advanced brain imaging technology have discovered that 12-month-old babies can form memories—suggesting that the reason we can’t recall our childhood is not that we didn’t form memories, but that we can’t retrieve them later.
Scientists have tried for years to explain infantile amnesia—the widespread phenomenon whereby adults can’t remember things that occurred early in life.
One theory that has been long-held is that the hippocampus, which processes episodic memory, isn’t fully formed during infancy to properly store memories. But new research is starting to flip that script.
In a recent research study by Tristan Yates and researchers, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the brain activity of 4- to 25-month-old infants when they were subjected to memory-tasks.
While infants were continuously presented with an array of faces, objects, and scenes throughout the experiment, followed by the memory test via the duration to which they were looking at pictures that were both familiar and unfamiliar, their brain activity was rigorously monitored in parallel.
The results were startling: the hippocampus of infants approximately 12 months old showed unequivocal evidence of memory encoding, indicating that the brain is building individual memories far earlier than had been thought.
So if babies can form memories, why can’t we remember those early experiences when we’re grown-ups? The scientists think that the memories are stored, but our ability to remember them fades with time.
This is supported by studies on animals, which show that early memories can be stored in the brain but lie dormant without some stimuli or cues.
Speaking about the findings, neuroscientists Adam Ramsaran and Paul Frankland noted that this research offers good evidence that infantile amnesia is less a failure in memory consolidation than a failure of retrieval.
That is, those early life memories aren’t necessarily lost—just hidden away in the brain, out of reach.
These new discoveries have exciting potential for grasping the workings of memory from the earliest moments of life—and how early moments may continue to shape us, even though we can’t remember them consciously.
