Barr – pre-birth memory

Well the experiments about why and how infants learn in the womb are quite wonderful and there’s a whole series of them. But let me just describe to you one of the more famous ones which is called The Cat in the Hat Experiment. And The Cat in the Hat refers to the story that Dr. Seuss wrote. And these investigators, DeCasper was one of them and Pfeiffer was the other one, had this brilliant idea of having mothers read a passage from The Cat in the Hat to their infants in the womb in the third trimester of their pregnancy. And they did that, I believe it was three or five times a week for about 15 minutes per time; it wasn’t a very long time reading. But they did it repeatedly in the later weeks of the pregnancy. And then when the babies were born the infants were fitted with headphones. You can imagine sort of infant headphones. And they had a pacifier put in their mouth that measured the amount of pressure of sucking that the infants did when they sucked on the pacifier. And when they hear something familiar they tend to suck with more vigour and more quickly.  

And this allowed the investigators to do an experimental manipulation which is always the gold standard for everything we’re trying to do when we study infant behavior. And they were able to selectively feed back to them through the headphones their mothers reading the same Cat in the Hat passage that had been read to them, so to speak, while they were in the womb during the third trimester. Or a control passage which wasn’t The Cat in the Hat which was another passage of equal length and also read by the mother. And the interesting results were that it was only when The Cat in the Hat passage was read back to them that the increase in intensity and speed of sucking occurred. Which was pretty impressive evidence of the fact that they recognized the passage that they had been read to prior to the birth experience.  

And now there are many, many studies out there that have used similar techniques and with other kinds of stimuli and it’s not limited to reading or anything about The Cat in the Hat particularly but a lot of stimuli that infants are exposed to, in a sense, in the womb earlier, can be demonstrated to have been remembered later. So it’s become a wonderful example of what is generally referred to as learning in the womb.