Babies as young as one year old can form memories, according to the results of a brain-scanning study published in the journal Science. The findings suggest that infantile amnesia, the inability to remember the first few years of life, is probably caused by difficulties in recalling memories rather than creating ones. This is the first time that scientists observed memory creation by observing the babies' hippocampus in real time. How Did The Study Work, And What Did It Find?To observe this, the researchers used a specially adapted brain scan for infants during a single session. It allowed them to watch how babies’ brains responded while they were awake and looking at images of faces and objects. Parents remained close to their babies, which helped keep them calm and alert.For the experiment, the researchers observed 26 infants aged four to 25 months. It was found that if a baby’s hippocampus was more active the first time they saw a particular image, they would look at the same image for longer when it reappeared a short time later, next to a new one. This suggested suggesting they recognised it. "Our results suggest that babies’ brains have the capacity for forming memories – but how long-lasting these memories are is still an open question,” said Tristan Yates, a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of psychology at Columbia University and lead author of the study.Episodic Memory Begins Developing Earlier Than ExpectedThe findings suggest that episodic memory – the kind of memory that helps us remember specific events and the context in which they took place – begins to develop earlier than scientists previously believed.Until recently, it was widely believed that this type of memory didn’t begin to form until well after a baby’s first birthday, typically around 18 to 24 months. Although the findings from the Science study were strongest in infants older than 12 months, the results were observed in much younger babies as well.According to Cristina Maria Alberini, professor of neural science at New York University, the period in infancy when the hippocampus is developing its ability to form and store memories may be “critical”. This window could be important not only for memory but also has “great implications for mental health and memory or cognitive disorders”, she added. Memories formed in early childhood do not typically last very long, it is believed, which might explain why we can’t remember them later in life. In an ongoing study at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, 20-month-old toddlers were able to remember which toy was in which room for up to six months, while younger children retained the memory for only about one month.How Early Do We Start Forming Memories?Humans’ near-universal inability to recall personal experiences from before the age of about three is a phenomenon known as “infantile amnesia”. As of now, scintists believed that it was because babies'brains were immature and weren't capable of stories any form of memory. But the Science study has shown that babies do indeed form memories. The mystery is why those memories become inaccessible as we grow older.