(NewsNation) — A new study has challenged the long-held notion that we don’t have memories from when we were babies.
Published in Science Adviser on Thursday, Yale University researchers investigated “infantile amnesia” by performing memory tasks with infants from 4 to 24 months.
Researchers from Yale University found that we don’t lose those memories, instead, we cannot access them in adulthood. The reason why is still unknown.
Babies were placed inside a functional MRI machine and shown a series of images for two seconds, with researchers analyzing activity in the hippocampus; a part of the brain associated with memories and emotions.
Shortly after, they were shown two images next to one another — one they had seen, another they had not. Researchers analyzed which image they focused on for longer.
Looking at the familiar image for longer was taken to mean they were familiar with it.
Senior author of the study Nick Turk-Browne, Ph.D., has said more research is being undertaken on the subject.
“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,” he said in a release.
This study could be the beginning of a greater understanding.
“The amazing thing about this study is convincingly showing hippocampal encoding processes in babies for stimuli that are, in some sense, unimportant to them,” Dr. Lila Davachi, a psychology professor at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, told CNN.
