The Ins and Outs of Infant Memory

What is your earliest memory? For most of us, it won’t be anything before the age of three. However, scientists affirm what anyone spending time around infants knows: infants from a very young age do develop memories. It's just that memories come in different forms. Among the earliest and most significant memories are of our parents' faces. An article on The Conversation shares a clever research model by Rovee-Collier and colleagues who delved into a different kind of memory, noting, "at six months, if infants are trained for one minute [in an activity such as kicking their legs to move a mobile], they can remember an event a day later. The older infants were, the longer they remembered. She also found that you can get infants to remember events for longer by training them for longer periods of time, and by giving them reminders—for example, by showing them the mobile moving very briefly on its own."

What infants don't seem to remember into later years are 'autobiographical memories.' Researchers call this 'infantile amnesia' and suggest that remembering experiences in your life requires a sense of self which doesn't develop until later on, as the hippocampus develops more fully. This, combined with developing the language needed for narratives, may be the key to developing memories that stick.

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