• Posted March 21, 2025

No Babyhood Memories? Study Provides Clues Why

Babies and toddlers are sponges, incessantly soaking up lessons from the world around them.

So why, then, can’t adults remember specific events from their earliest moments of childhood?

A new study indicates that memories of baby experiences might remain, lurking in the deepest recesses of the mind, and adults simply aren’t capable of accessing them.

Researchers found that infants do indeed form memories of specific events, even if they might not be able to remember them as they grow older.

The new findings add insight into the phenomenon known as “infantile amnesia.”

Experts have long believed people don’t retain specific memories from infancy due to differences in the way that a baby’s memory functions compared to children and adults, researchers say.

Newborns are more likely to experience a type of memory called “statistical learning,” which is focused on extracting patterns across events, researchers reported March 20 in the journal Science.

That’s opposed to “episodic learning,” a more mature form of memory that deals with specific events, researchers said.

“Statistical learning is about extracting the structure in the world around us,” senior researcher Nick Turk-Browne, a professor of psychology at Yale University, said in a news release.

“This is critical for the development of language, vision, concepts, and more,” he continued. “So it’s understandable why statistical learning may come into play earlier than episodic memory.”

But new research indicates that even baby’s brains are saving memories, even though these memories can’t be accessed by adults.

In an example, researchers said episodic memory would capture sharing a specific Thai meal with out-of-town visitors, while statistical learning would track what restaurants look like, where certain cuisines could be found, or how soon after being seated a person could expect to be served their meal.

Thus, babies are less likely to form specific memories that people could recall later as children or adults, researchers concluded.

These findings all center on the hippocampus, the region of the brain that manages the storage of long-term memories.

In an experiment, researchers showed 26 infants aged 4 months to 2 years an image of a face, object or scene.

Later, after the infants had seen several other images, researchers showed them a previous image next to a new one.

“When babies have seen something just once before, we expect them to look at it more when they see it again,” Turk-Browne said. “So in this task, if an infant stares at the previously seen image more than the new one next to it, that can be interpreted as the baby recognizing it as familiar.”

MRI scans showed that the greater the activity in the hippocampus when an infant was looking at a new image, the more likely the child would look longer at the same image when it reappeared later.

Further, the strongest activity occurred in the same part of the hippocampus that’s associated with episodic memory in adults.

But previous studies have shown that statistical learning develops earlier than episodic memory -- so how are babies forming these memories, and why don’t they last?

One possibility is that baby’s episodic memories aren’t converted into long-term storage, and thus simply fade away, Turk-Browne said.

Another idea is that the memories are still there, lying dormant and encoded, and we just can’t access them.

Turk-Browne suspects this second notion is correct, and is now testing whether infants, toddlers and children can remember home videos taken from their perspective as babies.

“We’re working to track the durability of hippocampal memories across childhood and even beginning to entertain the radical, almost sci-fi possibility that they may endure in some form into adulthood, despite being inaccessible,” Turk-Browne concluded.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on how memories work.

SOURCE: Yale University, news release, March 20, 2025