Babies remembered more than suggested, according to a new study

Babies can form memories, according to a new study published in the magazine « Science » and quoted by AFP. However, the question remains why one does not remember these moments at a later stage in life.

The first years of life are a period of intensive learning, but people usually do not remember them. This phenomenon is known as children’s amnesia.

« I have always been fascinated by this mysterious hole in our personal history, » says Nick Topk-Brown, Professor of Psychology at Yale and research scientific leader, in front of AFP.

Around one year of age, children are exceptional students. They learn the language, walk, recognize objects and social connections. « Still, we don’t remember any of these experiences, » Brown said.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, believes that early memories are inaccessible to consciousness through the mechanism of suppression.

According to the new study, however, the reason is rather in the hippocampus – part of the brain that is essential for episodic memory and which is not fully developed in early childhood.

Scientists have used the results of previous behavioral studies for their experiments that children who cannot yet express their memories tend to look longer at objects that have already been shown to them and who probably remember.

For the purpose of the study, a total of 26 babies were involved, half of the age under one year, and the other half over one year. The experiment involved scanning their brains.

Initially, the researchers showed them images of faces or objects, and then alternated an already seen picture with a new one. Investigating brain activity in the collision with something already seen (memory), scientists have confirmed that the hippocampus is active during the encoding of memories.

This is the case with 11 of the 13 children over one year of age, but not with those under one year of age. Scientists have also found that in children with the best results in the field of memory there was the greatest activity of the hippocampus.

« What we can conclude from our study is that babies have the ability to encode episodic memories in the hippocampus of about 12 months, » said Nick Topk-Brown.

But what happens to these early memories remains a mystery. Maybe they never stay completely in the long -term memory or remain, but they become inaccessible, researchers suggest.

Nick Topk-Brown supports the second hypothesis and is now led by a new study that aims to determine whether babies, young children and adolescents recognize the images they have seen before. Brown would very much like to know if the fragments can reactivate at a later stage in life.