fMRI research reveals how toddlers form memories
Research out of the University of California, Davis is offering insight into how toddlers form memories, marking the first study of its kind to shed light on how specific brain regions are activated during memory recall in 2-year-olds.
“One of the most fascinating questions in psychology and neuroscience pertains to how young children gain the capacity to remember their past,” Simona Ghetti, PhD, and colleagues wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America this month. “Early hippocampal processes have been implicated in this ability, but a lack of viable methods has hindered assessments of their contribution in early human development.”
To expand knowledge on the topic, Ghetti, a professor in UC Davis’s Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, and her co-authors studied 2-year-olds’ hippocampal regions while they slept in an MRI scanner. Toddlers were first asked to listen to a song while playing with a stuffed dog toy in the lab, then went to sleep in the MRI machine at their normal bedtime. While the children slept, the scanner recorded their brains’ reactions to several songs, one of which was the same they’d heard earlier in the lab.
Toddlers were also tested on whether they could remember where they’d heard that first song, the authors said, and if they could associate the tune with the toy they were playing with at the time.
Ghetti et al. found a child’s hippocampus emitted the strongest signals when familiar songs played, and kids with good episodic memory were showed stronger hippocampal activation in the functional MRI test.
“Our results provide direct evidence of a connection between hippocampal function and early memory ability,” the researchers wrote. “This experimental approach overcomes previous challenges and promises to pave the way to investigations linking changes in brain function to early development of learning mechanisms, including applications to typical and atypical development.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.