Babies Can Retain Happy Memories
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Wavebreakmedia Ltd/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Do you remember anything from when you were five months old? No doubt, you don’t.
In fact, babies that young would be hard pressed to recall things that happened from hour-to-hour. However, Brigham Young University psychology professor Ross Flom says that infants as young as five months old are capable of remembering things that make them happy.
Flom says her study is the among the first to measure how emotions influence memory. To do so, the babies first heard a person on a computer speaking in either a happy, neutral or angry voice. That voice was immediately followed by the visual image of a geometric shape.
The infants were later tested by showing a new shape and one of the old ones. The researchers then watched the babies’ eye movements and how long they spent staring at an image.
Invariably, the babies focused more on shapes that they associated with positive voices than the ones linked to negative voices.
Flom says that by heightening the babies’ attentional system and arousal, “We heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern.”
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