The human hippocampus constructs short-lived memories from around 1 year of age
(Science) — When you think of your first memory, it’s probably not from the day you were born. But that’s not because babies are incapable of forming memories; it’s because people have trouble retrieving those early memories later in life, according to a new study.
To study “infantile amnesia,” the researchers went straight to the source: They analyzed MRI brain scans of over two dozen infants between 4 and 24 months old, taken as the little ones were shown a series of images. After the first round of images, the infants then saw two images side by side — one they hadn’t seen before and one they had.
The team recorded activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with emotions and memory. They also tracked their eye moments, zeroing in on which image the babies looked at longer, something that indicates a level of memory recall. “Infants look at what they find interesting, and researchers have long leveraged this spontaneous behavior to derive information about memory functioning,” Simona Ghetti, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, explained to CNN.
The study takeaway: Babies can indeed encode memories, with the hippocampus becoming more active once a baby is 12 months or older — and the reason we cannot retrieve these memories later may simply be due to our adult brains not being able to access them. “This can remind parents that infancy is not idle time,” Ghetti said, “and that infants are learning a great deal.”
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