Sat Mar 22 20:30:00 UTC 2025: ## Babies Can Form Memories as Early as 12 Months: Study
**CHENNAI, March 23, 2025** – A groundbreaking study published in *Science* challenges the long-held belief about infantile amnesia. Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have demonstrated that infants as young as 12 months old can encode memories. The research, conducted by Tristan Yates from Columbia University and colleagues, involved scanning the brains of infants aged four to 25 months while they performed a memory task.
The study utilized a preferential looking test, showing infants images of faces, scenes, and objects, followed by a memory test. The results showed activation in the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for episodic memory, indicating the capacity to form individual memories begins around one year of age.
This finding suggests that infantile amnesia—the inability to recall memories from early childhood—is not caused by an inability to form memories, but rather by difficulties in retrieving them later. While infants demonstrate memory through various behaviors, the role of the hippocampus in these early memories has been unclear until now. The research provides compelling evidence that the capacity for forming episodic memories develops much earlier than previously thought.
First Piper 