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Have you ever wondered how it was a child? But regardless of how difficult you try, you can’t remember any of the details?
It is not that you do not have childhood memories – it is simply that you cannot reach later in life.
The study, published on Thursday in the magazine sciencesExamining 26 infants between 4.2 to 24.9 months, and they were divided into two age periods: those under the age of 12 months and those from 12 to 24 months.
During the experiment, the children were placed in Job’s magnetic resonance The machine was displayed a series of unique images for two seconds each. Researchers aim to record the activity in Hippocampus Part of the brain associated with emotions, memory and involuntary nervous system.
“The hippocampus is a deep structure in the brain that is not visible to standard methods, so we had to develop a new approach to conducting memory experiences with children inside the MRI machine,” said Dr. Nick Turk Brown, the author of the main study in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. “This type of research has often been conducted while children are asleep, because they vibrate a lot, they cannot follow the instructions and extend short attention.”
Dr. Simona Getty, a professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on the development of memory in childhood, acknowledged that although many studies have already demonstrated the ability of infants to encrypt memories, this recent research is unique through which it connects the memory that encodes the stimulation of the hippocampus. Getty did not participate in the study.
After a temporary delay, the children were then displayed two pictures side by side: one of the familiar photos they saw before and one new. The researchers tracked children’s eyes, indicating the image they focused on for a longer period.
If one infant spends more time looking at the familiar image, he suggested that they get to know it, indicating the recall of memory. If they did not show any preference, it is possible that this means that their memory was less developed, according to the study.
“Eye movements have been used in hundreds of studies on infants and classification,” said Getty. “Children look at what they find interesting, and the researchers have a long benefit from this automatic behavior to derive information about memory work.”
Husiness activation analysis
Dr. Nick Turk Brown (left) is a participant and father of the child to study MRI for infants at the brain imaging center (now brain works) at Yale University in 2021 – 160/90
Once the initial data was collected, the team analyzed the functional magnetic resonance scannings for children who looked at the familiar image for a longer period, and compared them to those who had no preference. Experiments are excluded if the child does not focus on the screen and is transferred or excessively.
The results revealed that the hippocampus was more active in older infants when coding memories. In addition, only older infants showed an activity in Tropical shellWhich plays a major role in the decision -making and recognition of decision -making.
“One of the things we learned about memory among adults is that the information we tend to capture and cod in memory are greatly related things to our experience,” said Dr. Leila Davashi, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colombia, who did not participate in the study. “The amazing thing in this study is to show hiping encryption operations in children in children for stimuli that, to some extent, is not important to them.”
Although it is still not clear why memory coding appears in children over the age of 12 months, this is likely to happen in the body.
“The infant brain is subjected to many cognitive, linguistic, motor, biological and other changes at this time, including rapid anatomical growth of fortresses,” said Turk Brown.
Turk-Browne and his team actively test the reason for the brain’s inability to recover these early memories in life, but it is expected to treat the brain in infants may suggest that the hippocampus does not receive the accurate “search terms” to find memory as stored based on the experiments that the child had at that time.
What does this stage mean for parents?
Ghetti encourages parents to think about the impact of childhood on their children, even if children are not able to recover the memories from which they suffered at such an early age.
Getty said that children learn a huge amount of this era, which begins to take an entire language by linking sounds to meanings. She added that infants also make expectations about their family members and study the characteristics of things and the world around them.
Parents often see this behavior when they sing the same song or read the same book, which Davachi noticed producing a familiar response in older children.
“The use of repetition with children will open a greater connection between parents and the child,” she said via e -mail.
Although you cannot remember these early memories as an adult, it is fair to say that you are learning from those experiences, which can be correct for both neutral and emotional information.
“This parents can mention that childhood is not the time of lethargy and that infants learn a lot,” said Getty. “Providing opportunities for visual exploration may be important to grow learning skills.”
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