Babies as young as one year old can form memories, according to the results of a brain-scanning study published today in Science1. The findings suggest that infantile amnesia ' the inability to remember the first few years of life ' is probably caused by difficulties in recalling memories, rather than creating them. 'One really cool possibility is that the memories are actually still there in adulthood. It's just that we're not able to access them,' says study co-author Tristan Yates, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York City. Try as we might, adults can't remember events from our earliest months or years. But whether this is because a baby's hippocampus, a key brain region in storing such memories, is not sufficiently developed or because adults cannot recall these memories has long been an open question. To shed light on the issue, Yates and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 26 young children, aged 4 months to 2 years,...
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