Yale's Cameron Ellis is first author of the study, and this research was included in his recently completed and award-winning PhD dissertation. "But our research shows that even if we can't remember infant experiences later on in life, they are being recorded nevertheless in a way that allows us to learn from them." "As these circuit changes occur, we eventually obtain the ability to store memories," he said. The size of the hippocampus doubles in the first two years of life and eventually develops connections necessary to store episodic memories, Turk-Browne said. The strategy makes sense because learning general knowledge - such as patterns of sounds that make up the words in a language - may be more important to a baby than remembering specific details, such as a single incident in which a particular word was uttered. This happens even though the brain is not equipped to permanently store each individual experience about a specific moment in space and time - the hallmark of episodic memory that is also lost in adult amnesia. What might be happening, Turk-Browne said, is that as a baby gains experience in the world, their brain searches for general patterns that help them understand and predict the surrounding environment. After the babies were shown these two sets of images several times, the hippocampus responded more strongly to the structured image set than to the random image set. Infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories, is associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood. In the other, images appeared in a random order that offered no opportunity for learning. One set of images appeared as a structured sequence containing hidden patterns that could be learned. "A fundamental mystery about human nature is that we remember almost nothing from birth through early childhood, yet we learn so much critical information during that time - our first language, how to walk, objects and foods, and social bonds," said Nick Turk-Browne, a professor of psychology at Yale and senior author of the paper.įor the new study, the Yale team used a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to capture activity in the hippocampus in 17 babies, aged three months to two years old, as they were presented two sets of images on a screen. Overview Amnesia refers to the loss of memories, including facts, information and experiences. The findings were published May 21 in the journal Current Biology. Although universally observed, infantile amnesia is a paradox adults have surprisingly few memories of early childhood despite the seemingly exuberant learning capacity of young children. However, a new brain imaging study by Yale scientists shows that infants as young as three months are already enlisting the hippocampus to recognize and learn patterns. In the late 19th Century, Sigmund Freud described the phenomenon in which people are unable to recall events from early childhood as infantile amnesia.
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