We are interested in studying children's behavior and development and how parents interact with their babies over time. Each day, infants confront a range of normal stressful social emotional events (e.g., waiting for their caregiver to respond to their needs). But do they remember these stressful events and for how long do they remember them? Freud first identified this phenomenon of infantile amnesia, but 100 years later, it remains an unsolved puzzle. Almost no one can remember an event that occurred before the age of two and a half, and seldom can anyone remember anything prior to the age of four. Almost every scientist who researches how personality or psychopathology develops agrees that what individuals have forgotten about their infancy profoundly shapes their mental lives as adults.

The goal of this project is to examine when young infants begin to remember events and for how long they can remember them. Much of the stress infants experience in their daily lives is social in nature, and finding out how a social event affects memory, behavior, and physiology over the first months life will fill an important gap in our understanding of how normal infants cope with and remember a stressful event.