- Yale researchers discovered that 12-month-old babies exhibit hippocampal activity consistent with the creation of episodic memories.
- Baby memories might be stored but are not accessible later because of neural pruning and a lack of language encoding.
- Early emotional experiences have lasting effects on brain structure and future behavior.
- Acknowledging baby memory creation could change early childhood education policies and parental leave guidelines.
- Non-verbal memory systems operate in babies, shaping their views and relationships.
Try to bring to mind your very first birthday. It’s likely you can’t, and that’s because of something scientists name infantile amnesia. For many years, researchers thought that babies simply could not make lasting memories because their brains were not completely developed. However, new discoveries question this idea. In important work from Yale University, researchers found that the hippocampus—the brain region in charge of memory—is working in babies as young as 12 months. This could suggest that even if we cannot consciously recall our earliest days, those experiences may still affect us in deep, unseen ways.
Understanding Infantile Amnesia
Infantile amnesia is the common event where adults cannot bring back memories from early childhood, usually before ages 2 to 4. Even though babies clearly interact with their surroundings—reacting to faces, voices, changes in what’s around them, and even routines—these early experiences are usually not available to us later in life. But why is this?
Several ideas attempt to explain this type of amnesia. One main idea focuses on brain growth: important memory structures such as the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex do not fully mature until later in early childhood. These structures are key for encoding, storing, and getting back episodic memories. When not fully grown, their ability to make long-term, joined memory traces is limited.
Language growth also has a vital part. As babies don’t have the vocabulary and language structure to name or categorize their experiences, it becomes hard or impossible to get these moments back later. For example, you might bring back “Christmas in the red house with Grandma,” but how does a baby categorize such details without sentence structure or names?
Another interesting explanation includes what’s called encoding-retrieval mismatch. A baby’s brain might record and store information in a way that’s fundamentally different from how an adult brain remembers and recalls. Therefore, even if the memory is present, we eventually lose the ability to get to or understand it.
All these viewpoints suggest that infantile amnesia isn’t because babies make no memories—but rather that the memories made might be fragile, broken, or stored in forms that are not accessible.
The Role of the Hippocampus in Memory Formation
At the center of memory creation is the hippocampus, a structure located deep inside the temporal lobe of the brain. It has a key function in making and arranging episodic memories—the personal moments that form the basis of our personal history. This includes everything from riding a bike for the first time to the clear details of a family trip.
In terms of development, the hippocampus grows quickly during the time before birth and soon after birth. For a long time, however, researchers assumed the hippocampus was not fully developed in function during babyhood—limiting how well it could encode lasting memories. This idea was supported by the lack of strong memory behavior shown in babies.
Recent brain science has changed this view. Researchers now see that the hippocampus, while still growing in structure and function, shows early signs of activity that suggest it takes part in information encoding. Long-term studies using imaging and thinking tests show that hippocampus growth does not just switch on suddenly; instead, it’s a gradual process. It begins to form the structure for episodic memory much earlier than once thought.
A 2016 review by Riggins et al. pointed out that parts of hippocampus size, connections, and reaction continue to grow into the teenage years, but even at early stages, the hippocampus helps to make early non-verbal memories, pattern recognition, and emotional-temporal awareness (Riggins et al., 2016).
New Research: Active Hippocampus in 12-Month-Olds
One of the most important additions to this discussion comes from a team at Yale University. Using a child-friendly version of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system, they scanned the brains of 12-month-old babies while showing them carefully chosen sets of images, patterns, and events linked by cause and effect.
The results were surprising to many in the field: the babies’ hippocampus regions “lit up” when shown these situations, showing active involvement in what researchers see as episodic-like memory processing. Importantly, these signals were not by chance; they matched changes in visual order and predictability, suggesting a system of expectation and recognition was at work.
This discovery is more than just interesting—it destroys the long-held idea that the baby hippocampus is inactive. Instead, it shows a picture of a young but noticeably functional memory system that can encode situation information even without language or fully grown recall pathways.
The effects are deep: we now understand that babies are not empty containers waiting for thought to start—they are actively taking in, arranging, and mentally reacting to their surroundings through a still-growing but active hippocampus (Yale University Research Team, 2024).
Why These Memories Don’t Last
So, if babies can make memories, why do they rarely stay into adulthood? The answer probably lies in how memory is stored and kept over time, and how growth changes affect that process.
Neural Pruning
In the first few years of life, the brain goes through a process called synaptic pruning. Basically, the brain makes far more neural connections than it will eventually use. Over time, connections that are not used regularly are removed, making thinking processes more effective. Sadly, some early memory traces might be lost in this pruning stage, especially those that are not strengthened through repetition or emotional importance.
Reconsolidation and Storage Challenges
Memories are not fixed—they change every time they’re reached or re-encoded. In babies, where emotional control and neural stability are still growing, this reconsolidation process might be uneven or incomplete, leading to memory weakening or change over time.
The Language Barrier
Memory and language are deeply connected. Once we have grown language, we start attaching verbal labels to experiences, which helps us arrange and get back memories effectively. Babies lack these semantic supports, making their early memories harder to find and describe later in life. These preverbal memories are stored mainly using visual, emotional, and sensory areas—but as we get older, we depend more on language-based categorization, making a difference in accessibility.
To sum up, the memories may exist in different non-conscious forms—sensory patterns, emotional marks—but they’re kept in storage systems our adult brains find hard to read.
How This Shapes Our Understanding of Early Learning
This detailed understanding of baby memory completely changes how we see the earliest stages of life—not as a preparation stage, but as a key time of active learning. Knowing that babies are already encoding events and experiences means that every sensory, emotional, and interactive experience helps to wire the brain.
Babies don’t need to be taught in a traditional way to learn; they are constantly learning through being exposed to things. Rich sound environments, caregiver response, and consistent emotional presence are not just good—they’re vital for shaping neural connections that support language, understanding others’ feelings, and thought.
Importantly, this strengthens psychological ideas such as attachment theory, which explains how secure, responsive caregiving in the first year shapes stress control, emotional safety, and even social thought. In memory terms, the emotional layers linked to early experiences act as a gatekeeper in joining different sensory inputs into joined knowledge.
Long-Term Emotional and Cognitive Effects
Even if we cannot recall a specific hug from our first year, the repeated nature of that affection helps biologically and psychologically to long-term emotional health. The brain in babyhood is very flexible, and things in the environment—especially emotional ones—leave measurable effects.
Positive Interactions
- Secure bonds, especially with main caregivers, have been shown to improve future memory performance, emotional toughness, and social behavior.
- Stimulating environments with play, music, touch, and visual things encourage joined brain and thought growth.
Negative or Deprived Environments
- Ongoing stress, including neglect, frequent caregiver changes, or trauma, can upset the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which may cause long-term psychological problems such as worry, ADHD, and emotional control issues.
- Under-stimulated environments during key times of brain growth may cause problems in language learning and social thought.
So, early experiences may be forgotten, but what happens because of them often continues throughout life.
Memory Without Language: The Power of Nonverbal Memory
Before they talk, babies still remember. This memory takes a non-verbal form: recognition of known faces, calming down at familiar lullabies, even showing fear in reaction to things that were upsetting before—all show a memory system that is working.
Studies show that babies as young as six months show signs of working memory, following moving objects and expecting outcomes. Visual paired comparison studies also show that babies look longer at new images than known ones, showing recognition.
This type of memory—non-declarative or procedural—builds a base for verbal memory by setting up predictable structures and emotional links. It’s the memory of how things feel and flow, not necessarily their names.
Understanding baby memory in this way has encouraged early childhood experts to start using teaching styles that are rich in sensory input, emotionally based and connect with babies at their growth level.
The Importance of Early Enrichment
With the understanding that baby memory is active, early enrichment becomes a neurological need. Every experience, whether comforting or stressful, strongly affects how the brain grows—not just in structure, but in how it stores and gets back information.
Key Enrichment Practices
- Predictable routines help build linked models and lower thinking load.
- Storytelling and song, even when babies cannot talk, make sound and emotional patterns.
- Responsive touch and gaze help babies feel safe and help emotional categorization.
Environments full of calm, repetition, sensory involvement, and emotional safety start best hippocampus growth and healthier memory patterns.
Revisiting Parenting Advice Based on Infant Cognition
Common ideas often underestimate baby awareness. But if babies are actively recording experiences—however simply—it calls for rethinking parenting methods. Responsive parenting is not just emotionally helpful; it is biologically basic.
Routines, being in tune with the baby, and emotional balance become practices of neurological safety. Parents should be encouraged to talk to their babies, play with them, and make calm spaces, even if it seems like the child will not “remember.”
Regarding screen time, this research suggests being careful. Passive visual exposure lacks the interactive context of human involvement that shapes memory and may not support the type of memory systems needed for long-term social learning.
Educational and Policy Implications
The deeper understanding of early memory ability calls for system-wide change in early childhood education and family policy:
- Baby-toddler programs should include emotional learning, repetition, and caregiver consistency as main values of what is taught.
- Parental leave policies should be presented as a neurological need, not a luxury—making sure caregivers have time to build secure, helpful memory environments.
- Early actions for babies at high risk, such as those exposed to trauma or poverty, should start before age two to use peak brain flexibility windows.
Future Directions in Infant Memory Research
As imaging methods like baby-friendly fMRI, EEG, and eye-tracking get better, researchers will study:
- How early memory systems relate to academic and psychological results in the teenage years
- Whether actions taken in babyhood can lower long-term trauma effects
- How babies’ self-awareness and identity form in relation to memory
Finally, we’re coming to a new brain science area—where the earliest impressions, qualities once made unseen by infantile amnesia, become visible threads in the structure of human growth.
Remembering What We Can’t Recall
Science now tells us that just because you don’t remember being a baby does not mean you were not learning. In fact, your early life was full of experiences that actively shaped your brain, your emotional system, and possibly your personality. Baby memory—and the new details of hippocampus growth—show that infantile amnesia is not about absence. It’s about memory stored in forms still not analyzed or reached by adult thought. Our histories begin far earlier than we can remember.
References
- Bauer, P. J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives: Memory in babyhood and beyond. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Riggins, T., Geng, F., Blankenship, S. L., & Redcay, E. (2016). Hippocampal growth and its effects on episodic memory. Memory, 24(7), 906–915. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2015.1064536
