{"id":29878,"date":"2022-06-12T00:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-12T00:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=29878"},"modified":"2022-06-13T07:03:34","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T07:03:34","slug":"why-cant-you-remember-being-born-learning-to-walk-or-saying-your-first-words-what-scientists-know-about-infantile-amnesia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/why-cant-you-remember-being-born-learning-to-walk-or-saying-your-first-words-what-scientists-know-about-infantile-amnesia\/","title":{"rendered":"Why can\u2019t you remember being born, learning to walk or saying your first words? What scientists know about \u2018infantile amnesia\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vanessa LoBue<\/a>, Rutgers University – Newark<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class<\/a> at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day their younger sibling was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite vast differences in the details, these memories do have a couple of things in common: They\u2019re all autobiographical<\/a>, or memories of significant experiences in a person\u2019s life, and they typically didn\u2019t happen before the age of 2 or 3. In fact, most people can\u2019t remember events from the first few years of their lives \u2013 a phenomenon researchers have dubbed infantile amnesia<\/a>. But why can\u2019t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants? Does memory start to work only at a certain age?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what researchers know about babies and memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infants can form memories<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Despite the fact that people can\u2019t remember much before the age of 2 or 3, research suggests that infants can form memories \u2013 just not the kinds of memories you tell about yourself. Within the first few days of life, infants can recall their own mother\u2019s face<\/a> and distinguish it from the face of a stranger. A few months later, infants can demonstrate that they remember lots of familiar faces<\/a> by smiling most at the ones they see most often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, there are lots of different kinds of memories<\/a> besides those that are autobiographical. There are semantic memories, or memories of facts, like the names for different varieties of apples, or the capital of your home state. There are also procedural memories, or memories for how to perform an action, like opening your front door or driving a car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research from psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier\u2019s<\/a> lab in the 1980s and 1990s famously showed that infants can form some of these other kinds of memories from an early age. Of course, infants can\u2019t exactly tell you what they remember. So the key to Rovee-Collier\u2019s research was devising a task that was sensitive to babies\u2019 rapidly changing bodies and abilities in order to assess their memories over a long period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"baby<\/a>
A mobile in motion can keep a baby entertained. Nattakorn Maneerat\/iStock via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the version for 2- to 6-month-old infants, researchers place an infant in a crib with a mobile hanging overhead. They measure how much the baby kicks to get an idea of their natural propensity to move their legs. Next, they tie a string from the baby\u2019s leg to the end of the mobile, so that whenever the baby kicks, the mobile moves. As you might imagine, infants quickly learn that they\u2019re in control \u2013 they like seeing the mobile move and so they kick more than before the string was attached to their leg, showing they\u2019ve learned that kicking makes the mobile move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The version for 6- to 18-month-old infants is similar. But instead of lying in a crib \u2013 which this age group just won\u2019t do for very long \u2013 the infant sits on their parent\u2019s lap with their hands on a lever that will eventually make a train move around a track. At first, the lever doesn\u2019t work, and the experimenters measure how much a baby naturally presses down. Next, they turn the lever on. Now every time the infant presses on it, the train will move around its track. Infants again learn the game quickly, and press on the lever significantly more when it makes the train move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does this have to do with memory? The cleverest part of this research is that after training infants on one of these tasks for a couple of days, Rovee-Collier later tested whether they remembered it. When infants came back into the lab, researchers simply showed them the mobile or train and measured if they still kicked and pressed the lever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using this method, Rovee-Collier and colleagues found that at 6 months, if infants are trained for one minute, 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<\/a> by training them for longer periods of time, and by giving them reminders \u2013 for example, by showing them the mobile moving very briefly on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why not autobiographical memories?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If infants can form memories in their first few months, why don\u2019t people remember things from that earliest stage of life? It still isn\u2019t clear whether people experience infantile amnesia because we can\u2019t form autobiographical memories, or whether we just have no way to retrieve them. No one knows for sure what\u2019s going on, but scientists have a few guesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"excited<\/a>
A lot of development needs to happen for him to remember an exciting experience. FroggyFrogg\/iStock via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One is that autobiographical memories require you to have some sense of self. You need to be able to think about your behavior with respect to how it relates to others. Researchers have tested this ability in the past using a mirror recognition task called the rouge test<\/a>. It involves marking a baby\u2019s nose with a spot of red lipstick or blush \u2013 or \u201crouge\u201d as they said in the 1970s when the task was created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then researchers place the infant in front of a mirror. Infants younger than 18 months just smile at the cute baby in the reflection, not showing any evidence that they recognize themselves or the red mark on their face. Between 18 and 24 months, toddlers touch their own nose, even looking embarrassed, suggesting that they connect the red dot in the mirror with their own face \u2013 they have some sense of self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another possible explanation for infantile amnesia is that because infants don\u2019t have language until later in the second year of life<\/a>, they can\u2019t form narratives about their own lives that they can later recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that\u2019s largely responsible for memory, isn\u2019t fully developed in the infancy period<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists will continue to investigate how each of these factors might contribute to why you can\u2019t remember much, if anything, about your life before the age of 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanessa LoBue<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University – Newark<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vanessa LoBue, Rutgers University – Newark Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":29879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42,3410],"tags":[1858,1033,1977,5163,3678,4256,1161,228,2455,460,11965],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29878"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29881,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29878\/revisions\/29881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}