Forgetting in infants can be prevented in mice by blocking their brain’s immune cells (IMAGE)

PLOS

Forgetting in infants can be prevented in mice by blocking their brain’s immune cells

Caption

Infantile amnesia is the global loss of episodic and contextual memories formed in early life. Our research shows that the engrams storing these memories endure in the brain into adulthood (in mice), but are not expressed. Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, function to manage these memory engrams. Microglial activity decides which engrams are forgotten during infant development, allowing the rate of forgetting to respond to different inflammatory experiences during embryonic and postnatal development.

Credit

Stewart E, et al., 2025, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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CC BY

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