We remember nothing of our infant lives but this does not mean we create no memories. Infant memory studies at a number of centres are showing that babies do create memories and can retain them for some time.
The AAAS meeting under way in San Francisco heard a number of scientists describe experiments to gauge the strength of baby memory.
The long held assumption was that all babies suffered from "infantile amnesia" but research shows that this is incorrect, stated Prof Patricia Bauer of Duke University.
"Infants are forming memories and holding them for a long time," she told the meeting. "That doesn't mean they aren't forgetting. They are forming memories but they are falling out." They tend to forget faster during their first year of life than in subsequent years when the memory forming systems mature, she added.
Prof Lisa Oakes of the University of California Davis described the methods used to gauge memory capability in a four-month-old.
"We are trying to understand how infants deal with this daunting task of remembering all the sights they see," Prof Oakes stated.
"It is important to understand how infants deal with this overwhelming amount of information." Clues to memory formation are linked to how long an object will hold an infant's gaze, she explained. They will look at a new object for some time before looking away, something she described as "novelty preference".
If this same object is presented again and again the infant will look away much faster the more familiar it becomes.
Prof Bauer described another technique where an infant is shown for example two cups and a block.
The block is placed in one cup and then topped by the second cup to produce a rattle. The infant is unlikely to combine these objects spontaneously, but can imitate the process. Researchers can then see whether the infant can repeat the assembly, either immediately or some time into the future.
"It is a task that works extremely well in infants," she suggested. This is because children are very inclined to imitate what they see.