San Francisco – Adults thinking back rarely can remember anything before preschool, but those bright infant eyes staring back at Mommy and Daddy really are forming memories. It’s just that babies also forget.
In fact, babies’ rate of forgetting is faster than that of adults, Patricia Bauer of Duke University said Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bauer was part of a panel discussing “infant amnesia,” the puzzling inability of people to remember events early in life.
Researchers have long speculated that babies’ brains were simply unable to form memories, but Bauer said new research indicates that is incorrect.
While rates of memory development vary among infants, all babies are extremely intelligent, added Lisa Oakes of the University of California, Davis. “The task they have before them is overwhelming.”
The ability to form memories depends on a network of structures in the brain, and these develop at different times, Bauer said. As the networks come together between 6 months and 18 months, researchers see increased efficiency in the ability to form short- and long-term memory, she said.
From age 6 months to 2 years, memory increases from about 24 hours to a year, she said.
Adults’ earliest memories of childhood tend to be of emotional events, either positive or negative, she said.
“Our lives completely depend on being able to remember the past,” Bauer said, and that matures the first two years of life.
Bauer said infants were tested by using objects such as cups and blocks. In one test, a baby would be shown two cups, a block would be put into one, the other cup would be put over the top and the group would be shaken to form a rattle.
This is something children don’t do instinctively, she said, but once they see it they can copy it, and researchers can see how long they remember when given the same objects.
Infants, Oakes said, will look longer at something new than at something familiar, which allows researchers to calculate how long the baby remembers something.
