Infantile amnesia results from differential memory retrieval in humans

Abstract

Infantile amnesia, the inability to recall memories from our earliest years, is the most common form of forgetting in mammals. Whether early memories never form, decay, or persist but become inaccessible remains unknown. Here, we investigated the nature of forgetting during the infantile amnesia period by longitudinally testing toddlers aged 18-24 months across the complete memory cycle from encoding, initial retrieval one day later, and delayed retrieval up to six months later, in a novel naturalistic episodic memory paradigm. Computational modelling revealed that forgetting during the infantile amnesia period was heterogeneous. Toddlers were as likely to retain the full memory as to lose it completely, while nearly a quarter retained only part of the memory. Encoding accuracy predicted which toddlers retained the full memory at the test one day later, but not at the delayed test up to six months on. Instead, a retrieval-specific EEG signature predicted complete, but not partial, memory retrieval, distinguishing which toddlers had retained the full memory before their behavioural response. Finally, leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we found that maternal immune activation during pregnancy, as in rodents, alters vulnerability to infantile forgetting in humans. Together, these findings show that early memories formed during the infantile amnesia period are not simply erased but persist in an increasingly inaccessible form, a transformation whose trajectory can be shaped by both the neural retrieval mechanism and the prenatal environment.