Memories of the first year of life, what happened to? There is a new research on the memory of newborns

The first smile, the first word or the first step. They are all goals of the child that parents remember forever. And however much they are fundamental experiences and conquests, no little girls have a heart when it grows up. THE First memories for most people date back to when you are about 3-4 years old Or an emotionally important or slightly traumatic event has lived, such as the birth of a little brother or the bite of a dog. How come? For a long time, the researchers believed that these episodes were not permanent due to the development of the hippocampus, not able to codify the experiences of the first years of life until the end of adolescence. A new search for Yale demonstrateon the other hand, that it is not true and that babies have their own memoryvery well functioning.

Like many aspects of modern psychology, the dissemination ofinfantile amnesiathe inability to remember the very first years of life can be synonymous, can be attributed to Sigmund Freud, although the phenomenon has been described for the first time by the psychologist Caroline Miles In 1893 Followed by « How old did you have? » Miles discovered that « the predominant direction of the child’s mind is demonstrated by the fact that seventy children show attention to the outside world and only twenty -seven to themselves. They are therefore more inclined to consider themselves victims of the sensations that agents that make things happen ».

The results of the new study «Hippocampal encoding of memories in Human Infants», Published on ScienceAnd Supervised by Nick B. Turk-Brown, neuroscientist in Yaleand led by Tristan S. Yates, a doctor in cognitive psychology, show that, in reality, Memories can actually be codified in our brain already in the first 12 months of life. To confirm this theory, tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) were made in a state of waking on infants, while observing the image of a new face, object or scene. The results also suggest that Infantile amnesia is not a problem of « writing » of memories, but of re -enactmentas previous studies on animal model have shown.

The research team had already discovered, in fact, that the hippocampus of Babies of just three months shows a different type of memory, called « statistical learning ». What is the difference? While episodic memory deals with specific events, such as, for example, a dinner in an oriental restaurant with a group of friends, statistical learning consists in extracting models through events. In this case, you can remember the restaurant furniture, the neighborhood in which it is located, the dishes enjoyed or the kindness with which it has been served.

These two types of memory use different neuronal paths in the hippocampus. And in animal studies, researchers have shown that the statistical learning path, which is located in the most front part of the hippocampus (the area closest to the front of the head), develops before that of episodic memory. Therefore, it was suspected that episodic memory could occur later in childhood.

Nonetheless, the last study of the research team confirms that The episodic memories can be codified by the hippocampus long before the first memories that we can have for adults. So what happens to these memories? It is a question that science does not yet know how to answer. There are those who suppose cannot be converted into long -term memory and therefore simply do not last long, and those who claim that they are stored elsewhere in the brain, in an area that we are not able to access. Or it could be that neural traces persist but cannot be recalled.