Researcher Says Infants Form Memories, But Also Quickly Forget
Friday, February 16, 2007            1706  PST

SAN FRANCISCO, California --  Adults thinking back rarely can remember
anything before preshool, but those bright infant eyes staring back at
mommy and daddy really are forming memories. It's just that babies
also forget. In fact, babies' rate of forgetting is even faster than
that of adults, Patricia J. Bauer of Duke University said Friday at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.

Bauer was part of a panel discussing "infant amnesia," the puzzling
inability of people to remember events early in life.
Researchers have long speculated that babies' brains were simply
unable to form memories, but Bauer said new research indicates that is
incorrect.

While rates of memory development vary among infants, all babies are
extremely intelligent, added Lisa M. Oakes of the University of
California, Davis. "The task they have before them is overwhelming."

Infants are very good at extracting information from their
environment, said Oakes.

The ability to form memories depends on a network of structures in the
brain and these develop at different times, Bauer said. As the
networks come together between 6 months and 18 months of life,
researchers see increased efficiency in the ability to form short- and
long-term memory, she said.

a year, she said.

But, noting that children, like adults, forget, she compared the
brains of infants and adults to colanders used to drain food. The
adult colander has small holes, for draining something like orzo or
rice, while the infant colander has larger holes, such as for draining
large penne pasta, but allowing more information to flow out.

Adults' earliest memory of childhood tends to be of emotional events,
either positive or negative, she added.

"Our lives completely depend on being able to remember the past,"
Bauer said, and that matures during the first 2 years of life.

Bauer said infants were tested by using objects such as cups and
blocks. In one test a baby would be shown 2 cups, a block would be put
into 1, the other cup would be put over the top and the group would be
shaken to form a rattle.

This is something children don't do instinctively, she explained, but
once they see it they can copy it, and researchers can see how long
they remember when given the same objects.

Oakes said she studied infants by watching how long they would look at
something. Babies will look longer at something new than something
they are familiar with, she said, which allows researchers to
calculate how long the baby remembers something.

Tracy DeBoer of the University of California, Davis, said babies born
to diabetic mothers are at increased risk of memory loss.  Such
children may have shortages of oxygen and iron before birth and that
can cause impaired memory when they are growing.

That impairment did not occur in cases where the mothers' diabetes was
controlled during pregnancy, she added.

... I'm not loafing;  I'm doing research on inertia.