Posted on 03/21/2025 12:27:09 PM PDT by Red Badger
Babies do form memories — they just can’t be retrieved later on
In a nutshell
* Babies do form memories. Brain scans show that by around 12 months, infants’ hippocampus — the brain’s memory center — is active during learning and linked to later recognition, suggesting babies can encode memories earlier than previously believed.
* The memories may not be lost, just inaccessible. The study supports the idea that “infantile amnesia” isn’t due to a failure to form memories, but rather a later inability to retrieve them.
* Different memory systems develop at different times. Even younger babies (as young as 3 months) show signs of statistical learning — recognizing patterns — while episodic memory (specific events) seems to emerge closer to the end of the first year.
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember being a baby? This blank space in our memory, known as “infantile amnesia,” has puzzled scientists for years. Most of us can’t recall anything before age three or four. Until recently, researchers thought baby brains simply couldn’t form memories yet, that the memory-making part of our brain (the hippocampus) wasn’t developed enough.
But it turns out babies might remember more than we thought. Research just published in the journal Science shows that babies as young as one year old can actually form memories in their hippocampus. The study, led by researchers at various American universities, suggests our earliest memories aren’t missing, we just can’t access them later.
How Do You Study Memory in Babies Who Can’t Talk?
You can’t exactly ask a baby, “Do you remember this?” The researchers came up with a clever solution. They showed 26 babies (ages 4 months to 2 years) pictures of faces, objects, and scenes while scanning their brains. Later, they showed each baby two pictures side by side, one they’d seen before and one new one, and tracked where the babies looked.
“When babies have seen something just once before, we expect them to look at it more when they see it again,” says lead study author Nick Turk-Browne from Yale University, in a statement. “So in this task, if an infant stares at the previously seen image more than the new one next to it, that can be interpreted as the baby recognizing it as familiar.”
Getting babies to lie still in a brain scanner is no small feat. The research team has spent years developing special techniques to make this possible. They made the babies comfortable and only scanned them when they were naturally awake and content.
The Big One-Year Memory Milestone
Babies begin forming memories around one year old. (© M. Business – stock.adobe.com) The brain scans showed that when a baby’s hippocampus was more active while seeing a picture for the first time, they were more likely to stare at that same picture later, showing they may have remembered it.
This ability to remember showed a clear age pattern. Babies younger than 12 months didn’t show consistent memory signals in their brains, but the older babies did. And the specific part of the hippocampus that lit up, the back portion, is the same area adults use for episodic memories.
The researchers had previously discovered that even younger babies (as young as three months) can do a different kind of memory called “statistical learning.” This is basically spotting patterns across experiences rather than remembering specific events.
“Statistical learning is about extracting the structure in the world around us,” says Turk-Browne. “This is critical for the development of language, vision, concepts, and more. So it’s understandable why statistical learning may come into play earlier than episodic memory.”
These different memory types use different pathways in the brain, with pattern learning developing earlier than specific event memory. This makes good developmental sense because babies need to learn how the world works before focusing on individual events.
So What Happens to Our Baby Memories?
This new research flips our understanding of infantile amnesia. The problem isn’t that babies can’t make memories; they clearly can. The mystery is what happens to those memories afterward. The researchers propose two possibilities.
3D rendered medical illustration of the hippocampus. (Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock)
“One is that the memories may not be converted into long-term storage and thus simply don’t last long. Another is that the memories are still there long after encoding and we just can’t access them,” says Turk-Browne.
The team is now testing whether kids can remember videos taken from their perspective when they were babies. Early results hint that these memories might stick around until preschool age before fading away.
“We’re working to track the durability of hippocampal memories across childhood and even beginning to entertain the radical, almost sci-fi possibility that they may endure in some form into adulthood, despite being inaccessible,” says Turk-Browne.
Your baby brain was busy making memories long before you could talk about them. Those formative experiences might still be stored somewhere in your brain, you just can’t get to them. Though we’ll never consciously recall those first years, this research suggests those experiences weren’t lost to an undeveloped brain but encoded somewhere in our hippocampus, potentially shaping us in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Paper Summary
Methodology
The researchers adapted memory research methods for infants who cannot verbally report memories or follow explicit instructions. Using a modified MRI setup with specialized equipment for infant comfort and safety, they scanned 26 infants aged 4.2 to 24.9 months while awake. Each infant viewed novel images (faces, objects, scenes) for 2 seconds during “encoding” trials. After a delay of 20-100 seconds, they were shown a “test” trial featuring the previously seen image alongside a new one, while eye-tracking technology measured which image they looked at longer. This visual paired comparison test uses infants’ natural looking behavior to assess memory without requiring verbal responses.
Results
The study revealed that when infants showed a familiarity preference (looking longer at the previously seen image), researchers could trace this back to higher hippocampal activity during the initial encoding phase. This effect was present across all participants but was most robust in infants older than 12 months. Memory effects were strongest in the posterior hippocampus—the same region heavily involved in episodic memory in adults. Memory signals were clearer for objects and scenes than for faces, and stronger for shorter versus longer delays between encoding and testing.
Limitations
Despite its groundbreaking nature, the study’s sample size of 26 infants, while substantial for challenging infant neuroimaging research, is relatively small. The fixed stimulus duration during encoding may not have given younger infants sufficient processing time. The single brief exposures to stimuli likely created relatively weak memory traces that may differ qualitatively from richer autobiographical memories. The research also can’t determine whether infant hippocampal encoding extends beyond simple recognition to include contextual information central to full episodic memories.
Discussion and Takeaways
This study provides the first direct neural evidence that infants can encode individual memories using the hippocampus beginning around one year of age. The findings contradict theories that infantile amnesia stems primarily from encoding deficits due to hippocampal immaturity. Instead, post-encoding mechanisms related to memory storage, consolidation, or retrieval may be responsible. The developmental emergence of hippocampal memory around 12 months corresponds with behavioral changes in infant memory abilities noted in previous research. The research suggests early experiences may influence development even if not consciously remembered later and raises questions about whether techniques might someday access these seemingly lost early memories.
Funding and Disclosures
The research was supported by several funding sources, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Tristan Yates, internal funding from Yale University’s Department of Psychology and Faculty of Arts and Sciences, support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. The researchers declared no competing interests.
Publication Information
The paper titled “Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants” was authored by Tristan S. Yates, Jared Fel, Dawoon Choi, Juliana E. Trach, Lillian Behm, Cameron T. Ellis, and Nicholas B. Turk-Browne. It was published in the journal Science on March 21, 2025. Raw data and analysis code were made publicly available through repositories linked in the paper.
I have that kind of memory ( no, not earlier than when I was 3, though ) and when I talk or think about something, I DO see it, like a movie, in my mind.
I used to have a photographic memory ( seeing read pages in a book and being able to reread the print ), but that ability has faded some by now, though I still CAN pull up some long ago pages still and read them in my mind's eye.
I was 10 months old when Kennedy was killed. I distinctly recall being in the living room, my mother ironing, and the television was on and my mother started crying. I can see the images on the TV screen. 10 months old. I suspect my Mother’s reaction left an imprint.
After that the next earliest memory was potty training...
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin was/is a serious question.
The medieval theologians were debating whether angels and demons could have a real presence in our world despite the fact that we can’t see, hear or feel them. At a slightly higher level of abstraction, one could ask if they exist in a dimension beyond the spatial dimensions and time that we perceive. Can you think of a better shorthand way to visualize the problem so that it can be sensibly discussed in a world that lacked modern mathematics and theoretical physics?
The snarky debunkers stepped in when the Age of Cynicism dawned, and for several centuries “sophisticated” thinkers sat around and mocked the stupid monks.
Then came Einstein and the succeeding avalanche of theoretical physicists. Do matter and energy exist and interact in dimensions beyond those our very limited sensory apparatus can perceive. Well, yes.
How many theoretical physics models do you try to keep up with? How many dimensions do the researchers now project mathematically? How many produce effects that we can now manage to measure given extremely sophisticated (and expensive) research contraptions? Is string theory still thought to be a viable possibility, and how many dimensions do the best current models project?
The medieval monks who were trying to visualize the problem didn’t have advanced mathematics. Heck, they didn’t even understand that the electromagnetic spectrum extends into frequencies far beyond what we can detect. They had the problem of invisible angels and demons, and research tools limited to what they could see with the unaided eye in the rec room of the monastery. Is the Bible wrong? Must all references to angels and demons be understood metaphorically? Or perhaps there is more to the real world around us than we can perceive. Maybe they weren’t so stupid after all.
I remember my little just born brother coming home from hospital..was prob on my 3rd birthday. Course, my Dad just got out of jail for drunk driving, too.
Can’t remember breakfast this morning..........
Why Can’t We Remember the First Few Years of Life?
You do when your near the end of life your in bed toothless bald waiting for somebody to feed you and change your diaper.
Somethings not worth remembering.
Five months old, with a clear and sharp memory, remarkable!
I don’t know what my age was then, but I can recall not being able to talk, and being feed something (water?) from a bottle.
I recall the water spilling out of my mouth, onto my t-shirt, not being able to do anything about it.
I recall a train trip I went on with my Mother.
I recall her perfume. Much later, I learned she was wearing the scent called ‘Persian Wool’ from Avon.
Sometimes there are baby memories that stick with us for whatever reason. Even if we can’t recall every detail of them.
Blows my family away because they were there too and their memory gets jogged.
I was 4 years and 2 1/2 months when Kennedy was killed. I remember Romper Room not being on and lots of talking going on the tv and my parents were upset.
Let’s ask the “memory experts” a simple question: what is the physical basis of memory? Molecules? Electrical phenomena in the brain? And how a human can force himself to recall things from the memory? There aren’t any answers to those questions, as of now….
The world has people with different abilities, interests and analytical frames of reference. Mine is very concrete. Neither string theory, angels on pins or free flow theorizing on baby memory formation intrigue me.
In my training there were those that stood in halls & theorized about processes where there was never an answer * there were those who hustled to get things done. The two types never truly respect each other.
Interesting. I can remember things that happened when I was three years old, and a few flashes of earlier times. My wife could not remember before six years old.
Maybe we were too focused on sucking on tits.......
There was an episode of Young Sheldon where his dad was trying to get a recipe from meemaw and she wouldn’t give it up and things got ugly.
To bring peace Sheldon spills the secret. He had overheard the recipe when he was two years old and remembered it verbatum.
Me too.
I have a very good memory when I was very young. I remember FDR’s speech on December 8, 1941, air-raid drills, when all the lights had to be off and the black window shades pulled all the way down so that no light could be seen from the outside. I was less than 18 months old at the time.
I just pulled up a photo of me and my brother. From his age, born in 1948, I was probably two and a half years old, living in a house near Dalhart TX. I still remembered it was Dalhart.
Did you read all of the last couple of very long postings you made? Just asking.
I can vividly remember certain events back to the time I was about 2 1/2 years old just before and after my sister was born. The memories are like watching a video and are in vivid color. A leaf fort, climbing on some tanks, a very small front end loader at the little power plant behind faculty housing, the day my Dad destroyed the front doorway of our duplex so the ambulance crew could take my Mom to the hospital when she nearly died. I was 2 years and eleven months then. My Grandmother was present helping with the new baby and I was standing in front of her as we watched. The door frame and the porch railings exploded. I remember well climbing the ladder from my bunk bed up on to the kitchen table to see the snow, falling and splitting my chin open and stitches and the hospital where our doctor sewed me up. One wonderful day of sledding at about three, our red and white Pontiac station wagon with its hood ornament, the day my dog died, walking on campus running a stick down an iron fence as we walked, Dad’s new office in the new Engineering Building with this amazing topographic map room and the small teaching reactor across the quad. Just a whole bunch of snippets of images. One of the best ones was Momma bringing in the frozen laundry from the clothes line. Nearly 70 years ago and I can still see her so pretty.
Those are some of my earliest memories. There was nothing before that summer and fall.
The best I can do is a few mental pictures of Key West when I was two.
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