A groundbreaking study published in Science on Thursday has challenged the long-held belief that infants do not form memories, revealing that young children do encode experiences but struggle to retrieve them later in life.
The research, led by Yale psychology professor Nick Turk-Browne, explored the mystery of infantile amnesia—the inability to recall early childhood experiences despite rapid learning during that period.
“I’ve always been fascinated by this mysterious blank spot we have in our personal history,” Turk-Browne told AFP.
Around the age of one, infants absorb knowledge at an extraordinary rate—learning to walk, recognise objects, form social connections, and acquire language.
However, they seldom retain direct recollections of these experiences. Freud once theorised that early memories were repressed, but modern neuroscience attributes this phenomenon to the underdevelopment of the hippocampus, a key region for memory formation.
Turk-Browne’s study utilised functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track hippocampal activity in 26 infants during memory tasks. By measuring their gaze patterns when presented with familiar versus new images, researchers found that the hippocampus plays a role in encoding memories as early as one year old. However, younger infants showed little activity in this brain region.
“What we can conclude accurately from our study is that infants can encode episodic memories in the hippocampus starting around one year of age,” said Turk-Browne.
The study leaves open the question of whether these early memories are lost entirely or merely become inaccessible.
Turk-Browne is now leading further research to determine if young children can recognise video footage recorded from their perspective as infants, with preliminary results suggesting memories may persist until around age three before fading.
