A brain-scanning study published in Science has found that babies as young as one year old can form memories. The study suggests that infantile amnesia, or the inability to remember events from early childhood, is caused by difficulties in recalling memories rather than creating them.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 26 young children aged 4 months to 2 years while they performed a memory task. The team found that babies who showed stronger hippocampal activity when looking at new images looked longer at those same images when shown again, indicating that they were remembering what they had seen.
The strongest encoding activity was observed in the posterior part of the hippocampus, an area associated with memory recall in adults. This study provides proof that the ability to encode individual memories exists and suggests a developmental trajectory for this ability in infants.
While the study found evidence that babies can form memories, it does not necessarily mean they can recall them as adults. According to co-author Tristan Yates, “One really cool possibility is that the memories are actually still there in adulthood, but we’re not able to access them.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00855-0