How Do Infants Learn to Move? Nick Turk-Browne’s Experiment and How to Give a Baby a Bottle of fMRI
The memories are possible to still be there in adulthood. The co-author of the study says they aren’t able to access them.
“What happens in the first two years of life is very important,” says Nick Turk-Browne, a cognitive neuroscientist. “That’s the period of by far the greatest plasticity across your whole life span. And better understanding how your brain learns and remembers in infancy lays the foundation for everything you know and do for the rest of your life.”
“Infants in many ways are the worst possible subject population,” admits Turk-Browne. “They don’t understand instructions. It’s like taking a photograph — you get a blurry picture [so] you can’t move a millimeter. And also they have really short attention spans. So we had to adapt.”
Turk-Browne and his colleagues have spent nearly a decade figuring out how to do fMRI research on babies. They came up with a bunch of tricks to keep them happy. If the baby cries, the experiment is stopped so the baby can play. “We have them bring comfort items like a pacifier or a blanket or a toy,” he says. “I’ve given babies a bottle during these scans.”
The First Time Around a Canyon, a Dog Toy, or a Woman’s Face: A Case Study on the Encoding of Baby’s First Memories
Then, one image at a time appears for two seconds before disappearing. These are images that they have never seen before — a canyon, a dog toy, a woman’s face.
“About a minute later,” says Yates, “we show them one image they just saw alongside a different image from the same category.” It could be a canyon near a waterfall.
The more activity in the baby’s hippocampus, the more likely they were to remember that canyon first time around.
These results allow scientists to “put the time stamp of our first memory a little bit earlier than when we thought possible,” says Flavio Donato, a neurobiologist at the University of Basel who wasn’t involved in the research.
He believes that infancy isn’t a passive, unimportant stage of life, but a more important consideration in how we raise and educate children.
It’s an important question, how traumatic events could affect the way in which this person will develop, and possibly lead to memories or traces in the brain that could persist for a long time.
To try to answer this question, the researchers are performing another study in which they ask families to record home videos from their baby’s perspective. When they play the videos for the infants in the lab, they’ll be looking to see how long those earliest of memories will last.
“What this study shows is a proof of concept that the encoding capability exists,” says study co-author Nick Turk-Browne, a cognitive psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
