The research team's early childhood memory loss, memory formation, and withdrawal function immaturity
Mar 21, 2025
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According to a study by Professor Nicholas Kirk-Brown of Yale University in the U.S. published in the scientific journal Science on the 21st, infants' memory task experiments confirmed that they have the ability to store individual experience memories from 12 months old.
The cause of 'infant memory loss' is not yet clear, and scientists have hypothesized that it may be because the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is important for forming 'episodic memory' and storing memories for a long time, is not fully developed and memories are not formed properly.
Recent rodent studies, however, have shown that memory traces form in the hippocampus, but become inaccessible over time. Paul Frankland, a researcher at the University of Toronto Children's Hospital in Canada, published a study in the biology journal 『Current Biology』 that 『Infantile experiences are stored in neurons』, but they are difficult to pull out through mouse experiments.
The Yale University research team conducted an experiment on 26 infants aged 4 to 25 months, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brain to see if the hippocampus could store individual memories. The babies were shown photos of faces, landscapes, objects, etc., and then brain scans were performed when the photos were shown again later, while eye reactions were tracked to investigate whether they remembered a specific photo. Professor Turk-Brown said that if a baby looks at more pictures he or she has seen before, it can be interpreted as remembering the pictures. As a result of the experiment, it was found that the hippocampus of babies began to have the ability to encode memories of individual experiences from around 12 months of age.
The research team said that the results of the experiment show that infants' brains already have mechanisms to form anecdotal memories at this time, even if infant memory does not last long, suggesting that infant memory loss is more likely to fail due to immaturity of memory consolidation or recall processes than a problem of memory formation itself.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
