The result concerns encoding, not adult recall A 2025 paper in Science found that activity in the infant hippocampus predicted which pictures babies would appear to recognize about a minute later. Tristan Yates and colleagues collected usable functional MRI scans from 26 awake infants aged 4.2 to 24.9 months. This is one study, not settled consensus. It provides evidence that parts of the memory-making machinery are working during infancy, especially from around the first birthday. It did not follow a memory from infancy into adulthood or demonstrate that forgotten childhood experiences remain stored for decades. That distinction narrows the old explanation for infantile amnesia. A young hippocampus may be capable of encoding at least some individual experiences well before people can later describe an autobiographical memory from the same period. The experiment turned looking into a memory test Testing episodic memory in a preverbal infant requires an indirect measure. The team showed each baby a new photograph of a face, object or scene for two seconds inside the scanner. After 20 to 100 seconds, with three to 12 other items intervening, the old picture reappeared beside a new one from the same category. If a baby looked longer at the old picture, the researchers treated that as a familiarity preference. They then sorted the original viewing trials according to what happened at test. The question was whether brain activity during the first encounter differed for items that later received the longer look. It did. Blood oxygen level-dependent activity, the indirect signal measured by fMRI, was higher in the hippocampus during encoding of pictures followed by a familiarity preference. The effect was clearest in the posterior hippocampus, a region involved in episodic encoding in adults, and among the 13 infants older than 12 months. The babies did not, as a group,