Infant hippocampal activity predicted picture recognition about a minute later, narrowing encoding-failure accounts of infantile amnesia without proving that early memories survive into adulthood.
Scientists long blamed infantile amnesia on an immature hippocampus that couldn’t properly make memories. Then researchers scanned the brains of 26 babies and found the memories being encoded. The problem may not be making our earliest memories at all — it may be finding them again years later.
Lachlan Brown