Babies Might Remember More Than We Thought

Nobody remembers their first few years of life, but that doesn't mean babies don't remember anything at all. "We have memories from what happened earlier today and ... even from a few years ago," Tristan Yates, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University, tells NPR. "But all of us lack memories from our infancy." Although child psychologists have long believed the brains of infants are too immature to create lasting memories before age 3 or 4, Science reports a new study shows babies as young as 12 months can create memories that last up to a few minutes. But there's a reason babies' memories have remained a mystery: They're not the best at sitting still in fMRI machines. "Infants in many ways are the worst possible subject population," says Yale University neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne. "[Using an fMRI is] like taking a photograph—you get a blurry picture [so] you can't move a millimeter."

So to conduct this research, a team of scientists developed a baby-friendly fMRI setup that allowed them to nestle the infant in bedding while parents could interact with them. Researchers then projected images they'd never seen before inside the machine—like a dog toy or a woman's face—for two seconds at a time before disappearing. About a minute later, they would show the baby one of the images they just saw, along with a different image. If the baby remembered seeing the first image, they would look at it longer the second time around. "It's as if you're still learning about it, so you're looking at it more," said Turk-Browne. "It's only really when they have a preference for the familiar thing that we take that as evidence of successful memory formation."