Babies remember good times and are more likely to memorize something if there is a positive emotion or positive stimulus that accompanies that action, according to a study by Brigham Young University in Utah (USA) and collected in the journal Infant Behavior and Development .
Because babies are still unable to express themselves in words, the team of experts decided to observe their memory capacity by looking at the movements of the babies' eyes and seeing how long they looked at a test image . First, they placed the participating babies in front of a monitor in which a person appeared addressing them with different tones of voice: happy, angry or neutral. After this, they were shown a geometric shape.
The test was repeated five minutes later and the next day. However, the next day's test incorporated a new geometric shape alongside the previous day's. The researchers recorded the time they spent on each of the geometric shapes, discovering that if the figure had been associated with a negative voice, they did not remember it, but they did or did it much better when it was about the figure associated with the happy and positive voice .
“We are the first to study how emotions in the face of stimuli influence memory. We believe that what happens is that positive affect intensifies the attention system and the arousal of babies . By augmenting these systems, we can increase their processing capacity and perhaps that's why they remember the geometric figure, ”says Young Ross Flom, lead author of the study.
