Babies Remember the Good Times and Not the Bad: Memory in Children

How much do babies remember? That's a good question. Parents who spend their time talking with and playing with their five-month-old babies may wonder whether they remember any of it the next day. It turns out that they do.

"People study memory in infants, they study discrimination in emotional affect, but we are the first ones to study how these emotions influence memory," said Ross Flom, lead author of the new study, in a news release.

Although five-month-olds can't talk, there are various ways that researchers can analyze how babies respond to testing treatments. In this case, the researchers monitored the eye movements of the children and how long they looked at a test image.

In order to examine memory in children, the researchers placed the babies in front of a flat paneled monitor in a closed off partition. Then, they exposed the children to a person on screen speaking to them with either a happy, neutral or angry voice. Immediately following this exposure, the babies were shown a geometric shape.

After this test, the researchers did a follow-up five minutes later and again one day later. In this follow-up, babies were shown two side-by-side geometric shapes: a new one and one from the original study. Then, the scientists examined how many times the baby looked from one image to the next and how long they spent looking at an image. In the end, they found that babies performed significantly better at remembering shapes attached to positive voices.

"We think what happens is that the positive effect heightens the babies' attentional system and arousal," said Flom. "By heightening those systems, we heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern."

The findings reveal that while babies don't necessarily remember bad influences, they do remember good ones. This could have implications for teaching and rearing children.

The findings are published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development.