It was previously thought that we do not retain childhood memories because the part of the brain responsible for storing memories does not develop well until adolescence. But new research suggests this is not the case.

Do you remember your first birthday? Or the moment you learned to walk? Most people do not retain memories from the first years of life, a phenomenon called childhood amnesia.

Children looking toward a sunset
New research reframes early memory as a question of retrieval.

Until recently, scientists believed this was due to the immaturity of the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for memory. However, a new study from Yale University suggests a different theory.

"We have traditionally thought that infants simply cannot remember events, but our data points to a different process," notes Nick Turk-Browne, a professor of psychology at Yale and the study's lead author.

The researchers showed children, aged four months to two years, new images of faces, objects, and scenes. After viewing several images, the babies were shown a familiar image next to a new one. At the same time, scientists measured the children's hippocampal activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The results were unexpected: the higher the hippocampal activity was when the image was first shown, the longer the child looked at the familiar image when shown again. This suggests that children did indeed remember what they saw.

"We now understand that the problem is not the formation of memories, but their retrieval," explains Nick Turk-Browne. "Memory works like a key and lock. Even if information is stored in the brain, without the correct key, we cannot access it."