Remember being… A BABY?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science wondering…
What memories remain from infancy?
Enter Tristan Yates and team from Yale. To find out, they used functional MRI, a noninvasive imaging tool, on babies!
The babies looked at pictures once and then a minute later, all while recording brain activity.
And? One-year-olds lit up their hippocampus — the brain’s memory center! Younger babies… didn’t. This suggests the hippocampus – and memory recall – kicks in closer to the first birthday.
So maybe infant memories aren’t gone! They might just be stored away until the brain grows into its playback system.
This is the FIRST evidence that babies can form real-time memories.
Now that’s one for the baby book! Or uh… SD card.
Reference: Reference: Yates, T. S., Fel, J., Choi, D., Trach, J. E., Behm, L., Ellis, C. T., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2025). Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants. Science, 387(6740), 1316–1320. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt7570