Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late 19th Century, Sigmund Freud described the phenomenon in which people are unable to recall events from early childhood as infantile amnesia. Although universally observed, infantile amnesia is a paradox; adults have surprisingly few memories of early childhood despite the seemingly exuberant learning capacity of young children. How can these findings be reconciled? The mechanisms underlying this form of amnesia are the subject of much debate. Psychological/cognitive theories assert that the ability to maintain detailed, declarative-like memories in the long term correlates with the development of language, theory of mind, and/or sense of "self." However, the finding that experimental animals also show infantile amnesia suggests that this phenomenon cannot be explained fully in purely human terms. Biological explanations of infantile amnesia suggest that protracted postnatal development of key brain regions important for memory interferes with stable long-term memory storage, yet they do not clearly specify which particular aspects of brain maturation are causally related to infantile amnesia. Here, we propose a hypothesis of infantile amnesia that focuses on one specific aspect of postnatal brain development--the continued addition of new neurons to the hippocampus. Infants (humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents) exhibit high levels of hippocampal neurogenesis and an inability to form lasting memories. Interestingly, the decline of postnatal neurogenesis levels corresponds to the emergence of the ability to form stable long-term memory. We propose that high neurogenesis levels negatively regulate the ability to form enduring memories, most likely by replacing synaptic connections in preexisting hippocampal memory circuits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".