Data for: Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

Humans lack memories of specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they performed a subsequent memory task. Greater activity in the hippocampus during the viewing of novel photographs was related to later memory-related looking behavior beginning around one year of age, suggesting that the capacity to encode individual memories comes online during infancy. The availability of encoding mechanisms for episodic memory during a period of human life that is later lost from our autobiographical record implies that post-encoding mechanisms, whereby memories from infancy become inaccessible for retrieval, may be more responsible for infantile amnesia.