Babies as young as six months old are capable of remembering specific events for a year or more, a study shows.

Researchers were earlier under the impression that babies do not have memory because few people can recall anything about their lives from before the age of 3, reported UPI news wire.

Patricia J. Bauer and other researchers at Duke University used sensors to monitor the electrical activity of the brains in their subjects as they administered simple tests of mental focus and attention.

The researchers found that that by 8 months, most babies can easily put together memories in adult ways, the report said.

Some infants have a detailed sense of the past - and are able to encode memories of specific events that can stay with them for many months.

The persistence of a memory becomes progressively longer during the first 18 months of life, the researchers said.

One possible reason people may not remember much from their infancy is that very young children forget things at a much faster rate than adults.