Even for young babies, out of sight doesn’t automatically mean out of mind. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that even though infants cannot remember the shapes of two hidden objects, they are surprised when those objects disappear completely.
The conclusion? Infants do, indeed, remember an object’s existence without recalling what that object is.
This is important, Melissa Kibbe explains, because it sheds light on the brain mechanisms that support memory in infancy and beyond.
“Our results seem to indicate that the brain has a set of ‘pointers’ that it uses to pick out the things in the world that we need to keep track of,” says Kibbe,
(Source: pss.sagepub.com)
