📋 Tender Overview
Grant agreement ID: 101265345
DOI
10.3030/101265345
EC signature date
25 August 2026
Start date
1 September 2027
End date
31 August 2032
Funded under
European Research Council (ERC)
Objective
We can remember our first kiss, but not our first birthday. Why are we unable to recall the earliest chapters of our lives, despite the fact that our brains were already learning at a remarkable pace This phenomenon—known as infantile amnesia—remains one of the longest-standing mysteries in psychology and neuroscience. It is all the more striking because early-life events, including trauma, attachment, and stress exposure, often leave enduring behavioural and neural signatures. Yet we still do not know why these formative experiences fail to register in long-term memory.
Recent evidence suggests that memory encoding in early childhood is surprisingly robust. So where, then, does forgetting set in In this project, I formulate and test two novel hypotheses: that early memories are lost either due to underdeveloped sleep-based consolidation mechanisms or because they become inaccessible over time as the brain undergoes a profound transformation in how it represents the external world. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive but have never been systematically tested—nor reconciled—across species, neural scales, and development.
MemOnto brings together paediatric intracranial EEG (iEEG), developmental scalp EEG, rodent circuit manipulation, and representational modelling to answer this question. WP1 analyses >300 paediatric iEEG datasets to track when hippocampal ripples and their cortical coupling emerge. WP2 uses rodent sleep recordings and optogenetic stimulation to test whether ripple–spindle coupling drives memory consolidation. WP3 longitudinally follows 3–6-year-olds, using EEG and behavioural memory testing to link representational drift to recall failure. WP4 provides an adult benchmark using the same neural decoding methods.
By connecting neurodevelopment, systems neuroscience, and machine learning, MemOnto will offer the first integrative account of how and when memory becomes truly enduring in the human brain—and why our earliest memories fade.
