Babies learn better in the right mood
If we are in the same state of mind when storing and recalling information, we can remember it better. An experiment has shown that this is already true for infants.
If you are in the same emotional state during an exam as when you memorise the information, you can remember what you have learned better. This is also known as state-dependent memory. This phenomenon has been well studied in adults. But what does it look like in infants?
Babies for whom the learning and retrieval conditions were the same (i.e. who either played twice or cuddled twice) were able to reproduce almost all actions on the doll. Babies who experienced one lively and one quiet phase, on the other hand, were unable to reproduce even one of the actions on average.
This suggests that mood swings can also prevent infants from accessing memory content, explains Sabine Seehagen, first author of the study. This may be one of the reasons why most adults cannot remember events that took place before the age of three, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.
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