Mind · IN60SECONDS

Why can’t we remember being a baby?

Nobody knows for sure. A 2025 Yale study found that infants can encode individual memories, which suggests the problem may be retrieving them later, not storing them. That’s a hypothesis, not a settled answer.

Quick Answer

Most adults can’t recall events from their first few years of life, a gap called infantile amnesia. Scientists long suspected that babies simply couldn’t form lasting memories because the hippocampus, a brain region important for memory, was still immature. A 2025 study from Yale University, published in Science on March 20, challenges that idea. Researchers led by Tristan Yates and Nicholas Turk-Browne scanned the brains of infants aged four months to two years while the babies viewed new pictures of faces, objects and scenes. Later, they showed each baby a picture it had seen next to a new one and measured how the infant looked at the two. Stronger hippocampal activity when a picture was first viewed was linked to stronger memory-based looking later, starting around age 1. That suggests infants can encode individual memories, and that infantile amnesia may be a problem of retrieval, not storage. It’s a hypothesis. The study doesn’t show that infant memories last into adulthood.

Key Facts

The puzzle: Adults can’t recall their earliest years, called infantile amnesia
The 2025 study: Infants aged 4 months to 2 years showed signs of encoding individual memories
Where in the brain: The hippocampus, a region important for memory
New idea: Infantile amnesia may be a retrieval problem, not a storage problem

Two ideas about infantile amnesia

	The older idea	The 2025 study’s idea
What goes wrong	Babies can’t form lasting memories	Babies can encode memories, but adults struggle to retrieve them
Why	The hippocampus is too immature	A mismatch between how a memory was stored and the cues the adult brain uses to search for it
Where it stands	Widely held, now questioned	A hypothesis from one study; other researchers will test it

Sources: Yates et al., Science (2025), and Yale News.

The puzzle

Ask an adult about their earliest memory and it will usually come from a few years into life, not from infancy. The gap is called infantile amnesia. One long-held explanation was that babies’ brains can’t yet form lasting memories, because the hippocampus continues developing well into childhood.

What the Yale team did

The researchers studied infants from four months to two years old. They showed each baby a new picture of a face, an object or a scene, and they recorded brain activity as the baby looked. After the baby had seen several other pictures, they showed the earlier picture next to a new one and measured how the infant looked at them. Babies can’t describe their memories, so looking behavior was the way to measure whether a picture seemed familiar.

What it does and doesn’t show

Greater activity in the hippocampus while a baby first viewed a picture was linked to stronger memory-based looking later, starting at about 1 year old. That suggests the capacity to encode individual memories develops during infancy. The researchers suggest infantile amnesia may reflect a problem of retrieval, not storage. But the study tested short delays and simple pictures. It doesn’t show that these memories survive into adulthood, and the retrieval idea is still a hypothesis.

Myth vs. Fact

MythBabies can’t form memories.

FactA 2025 Yale study found that hippocampal activity in infants predicted later memory-based looking, which suggests babies can encode individual memories.

MythMemories from infancy are all stored in the brain, waiting for the right trigger.

FactThat’s a hypothesis. The study didn’t show that infant memories last into adulthood.

The Bottom Line

We can’t remember being a baby, but a 2025 Yale study found that infants do encode individual memories. Researchers now suspect infantile amnesia may be about retrieving memories, not storing them, though that’s still a hypothesis.