Barr – infant memory

Infant memory is a phenomenon which I would say 15-20 years ago nobody believed in. The construct that these infants, when they come out of the womb, have the capacity for memory was really something that was beyond most people’s imagination almost. And a whole series of experiments, and mostly experiments that gave us an opportunity to access infant memory, has changed our concept about infant memory completely in the last few years. Now there’s absolutely no question that infants have memory, they have memory for sounds, they have memory for sight, indeed there’s lots of very substantial evidence they have memory of experiences that they had in the womb which we can then tap later once they are born. 

But the particular angle on this that we’re beginning to look at is What is the possibility that infant feeding has some at least short term effects, on the functioning of the cells that are relevant for memory?  

And in order to do this we use a paradigm or technique which is called an information processing paradigm. There’s all kinds of reasons to believe that this paradigm tells us something about the development of cells that are relevant for memory. And the paradigm effectively asks us to look at the infant’s ability to turn toward sounds. It’s called a head turning procedure. And the infants are presented with sound from one side or the other and whether they turn to that sound and continue to turn to that sound after the stimulus is continued repeatedly allows us to get a handle on whether they can remember a sound that they have heard and learn over a sixty-second period, a ninety-second period, a 120-second period, or even over hours and days. So this paradigm has been wonderfully successful at doing that.  

And we did ask the question as to whether or not a feed prior to them needing to remember this particular sound or particular visual stimulus affects the amount of time that they can remember sounds that they have already learned. And it turns out that that is true, that an infant that has had a feeding of nutrients or breast milk or a formula feed prior to undergoing this procedure is able to remember a sound they have learned longer than an infant that just gets a water feed, which is pretty compelling. These babies are two to three days old when we do this experiment. And so this becomes a wonderful illustration of the potential importance of feeding for the development of infant memory.  

Now while this phenomenon is very robust and we’ve shown it two or three times now it’s important to remember that there are a lot of questions still to ask about the relationship between feeding and memory. And one of those is – Is it the act of feeding itself that is relevant for them having this improved memory or is it something about the nutrients that they receive during the feed? And there is at this moment mixed evidence about this.  

It can be certain parts of the nutrient package that they receive or it might be the behavior or some combination of those might be important for the successful memory experience that they have. The other important question is Does it have something to do with the interval between feeds? Does it have something to do with whether the feeding, whether the memory improvement is only for a few seconds or few minutes or is it possible this might affect memory over a day or more? And those sorts of questions are very compelling and are now open to be asked and we now have the techniques with which to answer them.  

These are all however very labor-intensive studies and go on for a long period of time before you get these answers but it is really an exciting area to think that early infant feeding would have a difference for early infant memory. And we hope that that kind of question is going to be asked more often and demonstrated more often as well