Infant Memory Study: 12-Month-Olds Can Encode Memories
Why in the news
A new brain-imaging study challenged the belief that babies forget early life because they cannot form memories at all.
Key facts
- Method: fMRI; published in Science.
- Team: Tristan Yates and colleagues, Columbia University.
- Infants aged 4 to 25 months saw faces, scenes and objects, then were tested through preferential looking while scanned.
- Clear hippocampal activation during encoding appeared from about 12 months.
About infantile amnesia
- Inability to recall events of the first three years of life.
- A popular theory blamed an underdeveloped hippocampus, the brain region for episodic memory.
- Yet infants show imitation, conditioned responses and recognition.
Significance
- Direct evidence of working episodic memory encoding in infants.
- Suggests the problem is retrieving memories later.
- May matter for early childhood education, memory therapies and cognitive development research.
Exam angle
- Brain region linked to episodic memory: hippocampus.
- Age from which encoding was seen: about 12 months.