Mapping Early Memory Trajectories Across Species (ATLAS)
ATLAS investigates how memories are encoded, maintained, and retrieved during early development. Despite infants’ remarkable capacity to learn, episodic memories formed in the first years of life are often not retained into later life — a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. ATLAS seeks to understand why early memories are forgotten, whether they persist in latent form, and how early memory trajectories shape later cognitive outcomes.
The project is centered around three interconnected research arcs.
1. Early memory development
The first arc focuses on early memory development, examining how toddlers encode, retain, and retrieve memories over time, and how large individual differences in memory persistence arise. ATLAS asks how early individual differences in memory retention predict later cognition and school readiness, moving beyond average developmental trends to capture meaningful variability between children.
2. Maternal immune activation
The second arc investigates maternal immune activation as a developmental influence that may alter early memory systems. Leveraging both naturalistic human cohorts and data from established rodent models, ATLAS examines how prenatal immune challenge shapes memory development and behavioural signatures across species.
3. Brain plasticity and individuality
The third arc addresses brain plasticity and behavioral signatures of individuality, integrating naturalistic behavioral tracking, neuroimaging, and computational approaches. ATLAS investigates how variation in environmental experience shapes brain plasticity and behavior and contributes to individuality in humans and rodents.
Cross-Species Collaboration
While all research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development is focused on humans, ATLAS is embedded in a broader framework of cross-species collaboration. The project places particular emphasis on developing human research that enables meaningful comparison with animal models. ATLAS prioritizes the development of behavioral paradigms and the use of analytical tools that can be applied across species, allowing shared questions to be addressed despite differences in experimental constraints. Within this framework, ATLAS focuses on core processes that provide anchors across humans and rodents, including memory development, interactions between the immune system and the developing brain, and experience-dependent brain plasticity.