A new study published in Science has challenged long-held assumptions about infant memory, revealing that young minds do form memories from a very early age. According to the research, infants as young as one year old can encode episodic memories in the hippocampus, which is responsible for storing and retrieving memories.
The study’s senior author, Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology at Yale, says that despite our ability to learn quickly during infancy, we often struggle to recall specific experiences from this period. Researchers used innovative methods to overcome the challenge of working with infants in a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine, which tracks brain activity.
The team observed that when shown familiar images and objects, babies would spend more time gazing at previously seen items, indicating they were recalling memories. By analyzing brain activity during successful memory formation, researchers confirmed that the hippocampus is active in memory encoding from a young age.
However, the study also raises questions about what happens to these early memories. Perhaps they are never fully consolidated into long-term storage, or perhaps they persist but become inaccessible. Turk-Browne suspects that early memories may persist until around three years old before fading, and is now leading a new study to test this theory.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-scans-confirm-babies-form-memories-challenging-long-held-beliefs