Scientists explain why people have no early childhood memories

No matter how hard people try, they can't remember details from their early childhood. A new study published in the journal Science suggests that the reason for this is not that the memories are absent, but that they are unable to recover them as they grow older.

The scientists tested 26 infants aged 4 to 25 months in the study. During the experiment, the infants were placed in an MRI machine, where they were shown a series of unique images for 2 seconds each. The researchers' goal was to record activity in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with emotion, memory, and the autonomic nervous system.

After a short time, the infants were shown two pictures side by side: one that had already been shown and the other that was unfamiliar. The researchers monitored the infants’ eye movements and recorded which pictures they focused on longer.

If the infant looked longer at the familiar picture, this meant that the memory had been restored. If the infant did not look at either picture for long, this probably meant that the memory had not developed as much.

After collecting the initial data, the team analyzed the MRI scans of the infants who had looked longer at the familiar picture and compared them with those of the others.

“The results showed that the hippocampus was more active during the encoding of the memory in older infants. In addition, only the older infants showed activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which plays a key role in decision-making and recognition related to memory,” the article says.

While it is not known why memory encoding is more pronounced in infants older than 12 months, it is likely related to the major changes in the body.

“During this period, the infant’s brain undergoes many changes in cognition, language, motor skills, biology and other areas, including rapid anatomical growth of the hippocampus,” said lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Yale University, Dr. Nick Turk-Brown.

Researchers are actively working to understand why the brain cannot retrieve these early memories, but they suspect that the hippocampus does not receive specific “search queries” to find the memory because it is stored based on the child’s early experiences. Follow “Zamin” news on “Telegram”