A recent study published in Science reveals that babies as young as one year can form memories, challenging the notion of infantile amnesia, which may instead result from difficulty recalling memories rather than being unable to create them. Researchers utilized functional MRI to examine 26 infants' brain activity as they recognized familiar images. The results indicated a strong correlation between hippocampal activity and memory recall, suggesting that memories might persist into adulthood, yet remain inaccessible. This research opens doors to understanding early memory formation and its implications for cognition.
The findings suggest that infantile amnesia... is probably caused by difficulties in recalling memories, rather than creating them.
One really cool possibility is that the memories are actually still there in adulthood. It's just that we're not able to access them.
To shed light on the issue, Yates and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 26 young children, aged 4 months to 2 years.
They found that the greater the hippocampal activity when a baby was looking at a new image, the longer they looked at that image when shown it again.
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