About Birth of Memories Study
Significance
How
We will give each participating family an iPhone. The caregiver will record and share videos of real-life experiences of their child: Please see the Instructions page. Then, at an fMRI scan, we can study the child's brain activity when they re-experience those events to see if they remember those same events.
We will invite you and your family to an fMRI scan every 3 months at the FAS Brain Imaging Center located in the Dunham Lab building (8 Hillhouse Avenue, Suite 108). We will reimburse you for travel, parking, and for your time each time you visit. Information on fMRI can be found on the FAQ page.
New insights into the human memory system
We can vividly recollect autobiographical memories from nearly all stages of our lives — yesterday, last month, five years ago — but struggle to grasp for recollections from the first several years in life. Indeed, for most, very few memories before the third year of life can be recollected in adulthood. Scientists have debated why we remember so little from this period of life — a phenomenon known as Infantile Amnesia. In adults, amnesia, or loss, of episodic memories is caused by impairments to a brain structure known as the hippocampus11. Thus, new episodic memories cannot be formed and existing memories, especially when formed recently, cannot be retrieved without the hippocampus. Our goal is to study whether hippocampal activity is observed when infants re-experience autobiographical events that have been recorded on video by the caregivers. By studying the brain, and the hippocampus specifically, we can study when and how infants remember autobiographical memories.