Positive Interactions Affect Baby’s Memories, Researchers Find

Amy Taylor November 28, 2014

There’s really something good about talking to your baby and making him or her smile. According to a new study, babies are more likely to remember something if there is a positive emotion, or affect, that accompanies it.

Although the five-month-olds can’t talk, there are a number of different ways that researchers can analyse how the babies respond to testing treatments.

In this particular study, they monitored the infants’ eye movements and how long they look at a test image.

The babies were set in front of a flat panelled monitor in a closed off partition and then exposed to a person on screen speaking to them with either a happy, neutral, or angry voice. Immediately following the emotional exposure, they were shown a geometric shape.

To test their memory, the researchers did follow-up tests five minutes later and again one day later. In the follow-up test, babies were shown two side-by-side geometric shapes: a brand new one, and the original one from the study.

Researchers then recorded how many times the baby looked from one image to the next and how long they spent looking at each image.

“People study memory in infants, they study discrimination in emotional affect, but we are the first ones to study how these emotions influence memory,” said lead investigator Professor Ross Flom.

The team found that babies’ memories didn’t improve if the shape had been paired with a negative voice, but they performed significantly better at remembering shapes attached to positive voices.

“We think what happens is that the positive affect heightens the babies’ attentional system and arousal,” Flom said. “By heightening those systems, we heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern.”

The new findings were published in the journal Infant Behaviour and Development.

Source of this article: Positive Emotions Affect Baby Memories