Behavioral Tagging in the Developing Animal

Infancy is a critical period that shapes an individual’s emotional and developmental trajectory. Indeed, negative early life experiences have been suggested to form the foundation for later-life mental health function with many anxiety disorders having their onset during childhood or adolescence. Despite this, there are still many unanswered questions regarding how these early life experiences are retained. This is surprising given that, unlike adult animals, infants exhibit an impaired ability to form long-term memories. More recently, several studies have demonstrated that exposure to a novel environment may stabilize the persistence of weak memories, a phenomenon often attributed to a process referred to as behavioral tagging. While behavioral tagging processes have been repeatedly demonstrated in adult animals, few studies have examined whether it occurs in the developing animal, which is somewhat puzzling given the typically weak memory in the young. In this chapter, we explore whether behavioral tagging processes may also underlie the formation of long-term memories in infant animals. We also examine whether the processes underlying behavioral tagging in the adult animal may be similar in the developing animal.