Why don’t we remember infancy? A first-of-its-kind study aims to find out

A child’s early years are an astonishing period of life, bursting with dazzling novel experiences, explosive developmental leaps and all the joy and pain and wonder that comes with being newly alive.It is also a wholly unmemorable time. This is because of a phenomenon called infantile amnesia – the rapid forgetting of memories formed during early childhood. Infantile amnesia is a universal human experience that remains poorly understood, but scientific interest in the topic has grown in recent years, owing in part to the advent of technologies that enable researchers to peer deeper into brains.Sarah Power, a post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is conducting one of the first prospective studies of children and how their memories form over time.