What's the earliest memory you can recall? While many people's recollections of the past may stretch back into childhood, research shows that the trip down memory lane generally hits a wall once you reach infancy. In some ways, this doesn't make much sense--after all, the first years of a baby's life are when they learn foundational psychological concepts, form relationships with caregivers, and gain a sense of self. Experts have long attributed this "infant amnesia" to the development timeline of the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for retaining memories. But according to new evidence from a team at Yale University, the explanation for early our memory blocks may be a bit more complicated.

Humans can learn individual episodes and generalizable rules and also successfully retain both kinds of acquired knowledge over time. In the cognitive science literature, (1) learning individual episodes and rules and (2) learning and remembering are often both conceptualized as competing processes that necessitate separate, complementary learning systems. Inspired by recent research in statistical learning, we challenge these trade-offs, hypothesizing that they arise from capacity limitations rather than from the inherent incompatibility of the underlying cognitive processes. Using an associative learning task, we show that one system with excess representational capacity can learn and remember both episodes and rules.