Infants too form memories, but forget them

When it comes to memories of infancy, almost everyone draws a blank.

When it comes to memories of infancy, almost everyone draws a blank. Hardly anyone can recall those opening pages of life’s story, when the discoveries of early childhood write themselves into every newborn’s brain. Until recently, brain researchers were convinced that babies simply make personal memories that lasted, since almost no one can recollect anything that happened to them before the age of three.

Yet children as young as six months old do have a detailed sense of the past, able to encode memories of specific events that can linger for a year or more, reported scientists at the annual meeting here

of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. By using sensors that monitor the brain’s electrical activity and simple tests of mental focus and attention, researchers at Duke University in North Carolina demonstrated that by eight months of age, most babies can easily weave together memories of events in adult ways.

Over the first 18 months of life, the duration of a memory becomes progressively longer as the developing brain creates neural networks to store and retrieve the neuro-chemical essence of things past.

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Psychologist Patricia Bauer of Duke said that memory increases from about 24 hours at six months of age, to about a year at two years. The problem, researchers said, is that very young children forget at a rate much faster than adults. Bauer said the brains of infants and adults are like colanders. The adult colander has small holes, while the infant colander has larger holes, allowing information to flow out.

“It used to be the case that we thought young children simply could not form memories,’’ Bauer said. “Children are forgetting at a faster rate than adults.’’