Adults may find themselves unlocking long-forgotten childhood memories simply by viewing their own face through a digital ‘baby filter’, new research suggests.
Fifty participants were involved in a study, where they were asked to observe a live video feed of their face, digitally altered to appear childlike.
As participants moved, the on-screen face mirrored their actions, creating a strong sense that the youthful face was their own.
A control group, meanwhile, viewed their unaltered adult reflections.
Afterwards, all participants completed an autobiographical memory interview, recalling events from both their childhood and the past year.
The research, led by neuroscientists at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, indicated that “participants who enfaced (embodied) their child-like face recollected more childhood episodic memory details than those who enfaced their adult face”.
The experiment did not assess the “extent to which the participants felt that the morphed face resembled their childhood face”.
The researchers believe their findings offer new insights into how bodily self-perception interacts with memory.
They believe it could pave the way for new techniques to access previously inaccessible memories, such as from the ‘childhood amnesia’ phase, which is typically before the age of three.
Lead author Dr Utkarsh Gupta, who conducted the study as part of his PhD at Anglia Ruskin University, said: “All the events that we remember are not just experiences of the external world, but are also experiences of our body, which is always present.
“We discovered that temporary changes to the bodily self, specifically, embodying a childlike version of one’s own face, can significantly enhance access to childhood memories.
“This might be because the brain encodes bodily information as part of the details of an event.
“Reintroducing similar bodily cues may help us retrieve those memories, even decades later.”
Dr Gupta is now a cognitive neuroscience research fellow at the University of North Dakota.
Senior author Professor Jane Aspell, of Anglia Ruskin University, said: “When our childhood memories were formed, we had a different body.
“So we wondered: if we could help people experience aspects of that body again, could we help them recall their memories from that time?
“Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories.
“These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives – perhaps even from early infancy.
“In the future, it may even be possible to adapt the illusion to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments.”
The research is published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
