WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Although infancy is a period of rapid learning, most people struggle to recall events from their first three years of life. This phenomenon is known as infantile amnesia.
A recent fMRI study challenged the assumption that infants cannot form memories. Researchers discovered that babies as young as 12 months can encode memories, suggesting that infantile amnesia results from retrieval failures rather than an inability to create memories.
Published in the journal Science, the study examined 26 infants aged 4.2 to 24.9 months, divided into two groups. One group with those younger than 12 months and another one with those between 12 and 24 months.
During the experiment, babies were placed in an fMRI machine and shown a series of unique images for two seconds each. Researchers focused on tracking activity in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, emotions, and the autonomic nervous system.
'The hippocampus is a deep brain structure that is not visible to standard methods, so we had to develop a new approach for conducting memory experiments with babies inside an MRI machine,' lead study author Dr. Nick Turk-Browne told CNN.
'This kind of research has previously been done mostly while infants are asleep, because they wiggle a lot, cannot follow instructions and have short attention spans.'
After a short delay, the babies were shown two images side by side-one they had seen before and one new. By monitoring their eye movements, researchers determined which image captured their attention for longer.
If an infant focused more on the familiar image, it indicated memory recall. A lack of preference suggested less-developed memory recognition.
The research team then analyzed fMRI scans of babies who spent more time looking at the familiar image, comparing them with infants who showed no preference. Trials were excluded if a baby was distracted, moved too much, or blinked excessively.
The results showed that older infants exhibited greater hippocampal activity during memory encoding. Additionally, only infants over 12 months displayed activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region crucial for memory-based decision-making and recognition.
While the exact reason memory encoding strengthens after 12 months remains unclear, researchers believe it may be linked to significant developmental changes in the brain.
Turk-Browne and his team continue to investigate why early memories are difficult to retrieve later in life. He speculates that the infant brain may not provide the hippocampus with the necessary 'search terms' to locate stored memories, as early experiences are processed differently than the later ones.
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