India, March 21 -- Although infancy is a period of rapid learning, most people struggle to recall events from their first three years of life. This phenomenon is known as infantile amnesia.
A recent fMRI study challenged the assumption that infants cannot form memories. Researchers discovered that babies as young as 12 months can encode memories, suggesting that infantile amnesia results from retrieval failures rather than an inability to create memories.
Published in the journal Science, the study examined 26 infants aged 4.2 to 24.9 months, divided into two groups. One group with those younger than 12 months and another one with those between 12 and 24 months.
During the experiment, babies were placed in an fMRI machine and shown a ser...