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The hippocampus grows up

Nature Neuroscience volume 19, pages 1190–1191 (2016)Cite this article

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The inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories of infancy is referred to as infantile amnesia. A study now provides one of the first explanations of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

Many events took place in your life before the age of 3 or 4. Why, then, do you not remember them? Where have those memories gone? A long-serving former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, once wrote in his Director's blog: “My four-year-old grandson has a near photographic memory for outings we took a year ago, for people he met six months ago, and for books he has not seen in weeks. Soon that will all disappear ... And by the time he is eighteen, he will remember details going back to age four and he will retain language and habits acquired before age four, but in terms of autobiographical or episodic memories, the earliest years will be almost a complete blank”1. As it happens, this inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories before the age of 3 or 4 is a fact of life for pretty much all humankind; it is referred to as infantile amnesia (IA)2,3. More than 100 years of research related to IA have struggled to produce any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon4. Now Travaglia et al.5, publishing in this issue of Nature Neuroscience, manage to do just that, demonstrating that a major brain structure involved in episodic memory formation, the dorsal hippocampus, undergoes a critical period during which it acquires adult-like competence to process memory. Moreover, the authors show that early episodic memories formed through critical-period mechanisms are not lost but stored as latent traces that can be later recalled.

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Figure 1: The infantile hippocampus learns how to process memories.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Andrii Rudenko and Li-Huei Tsai are at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and,

    Andrii Rudenko & Li-Huei Tsai

  2. Li-Huei Tsai is at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Li-Huei Tsai

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  1. Andrii Rudenko
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  2. Li-Huei Tsai
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Correspondence to Li-Huei Tsai.

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Rudenko, A., Tsai, LH. The hippocampus grows up. Nat Neurosci 19, 1190–1191 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4368

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