Sahana Sitaraman in The Scientist:
An infant learns many things in the first few years of life—movements, languages, relationships, and more—all of which require memory formation. Yet, if an adult is asked to recall individual experiences from this dynamic period, they would hardly remember any. This paradoxical phenomenon, called infantile amnesia, has intrigued scientists for more than a century.1
One important way the brain remembers the world is by forming episodic memories to immortalize experiences, which include multiple components such as places, objects, and people involved. Within the brain, a banana-shaped structure called the hippocampus is crucial for the formation of episodic memories.2 On studying patients suffering from amnesia with hippocampal lesions, scientists observed similarities between their memory capabilities and those of infants. Based on these findings and the fact that the hippocampus is immature until adolescence, the prevailing theory suggests that infantile amnesia emerges from the inability of the hippocampus to encode experiences during early years of life.2 Now, in a study published in Science, researchers at Yale University reported that infants as young as one year old can encode episodic memories, overturning the longstanding hypothesis.3
More here.
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