Baby scans as a reminder of the first years of life, or how we learned to walk and what to do next: a toy model
Yates says the signal was stronger in the older generation than in the younger ones, suggesting a kind of developmental trajectory for the ability of the hippocampus to store individual memories.
The results might show something important about the early moments of our development. “That’s the time when we learn who our parents are, that’s when we learn language, that’s when we learn how to walk,” Yates says.
“Infants in many ways are the worst possible subject population,” admits Turk-Browne. “They don’t understand instructions. It’s akin to taking a photograph, but with a blurry picture. It is not possible to move a millimeter. They only have short attention spans. We had to find a way to adapt.
A decade ago, Turk-Browne and his colleagues spent a lot of time figuring out how to conduct research on babies. They have come up with all sorts of tricks to keep them happy and engaged. The experiment stops if the baby cries. He says their comfort items are a pacifier, a blanket or a toy. “I’ve given babies a bottle during these scans.”
The first picture that baby saw before seeing another’s face or a canyon toy or the waterfall: a cognitive psychologist’s study
There was a single image that appeared for two seconds before vanishing. They’ve never seen a canyon, a dog toy or a woman’s face before.
“About a minute later,” says Yates, “we show them one image they just saw alongside a different image from the same category.” That could be the canyon near a waterfall.
They found that the greater the hippocampal activity when a baby was looking at a new image, the longer they looked at that image when shown it again. This result suggests that babies were remembering the things they had seen because they spent more time looking at familiar things.
The research results allow scientists to put the time stamp on the first memory a little bit earlier than they had thought possible.
He says it now appears that infancy isn’t a passive, forgettable stage of our lives — a relevant consideration for how we raise and educate children, and even how we understand early trauma or stress.
“It is crucial to understand how traumatic events could affect the way in which a person will develop, and even whether they would last a long time”, says Donato.
The team looked at the childrens activity when they viewed a new face, object or scene for two seconds and then saw the same image again about a minute later.
The findings of the study show that the capability exists, says the study’s co-author, cognitive psychologist Nick Turk-Browne.