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.