A study at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge revealed that adults may recover forgotten childhood memories when looking at their faces through a digital “childhood filter.”

In an experiment involving 50 participants, their faces were digitally altered to appear as children’s faces in a live video stream, simulating their natural movements on screen, creating a strong sense of belonging to this childlike face. In contrast, a control group viewed reflections of their adult faces without any modification.

After the experiment, all participants underwent an autobiographical memory interview, where they were asked to recall events from their childhood and the past year. Results showed that participants who saw their childlike faces recalled more details from their childhood memories compared to those who saw their adult faces.

Dr. Utkarsh Gupta, the study’s lead author, explained that “all events we remember are not just experiences from the outside world, but also experiences of our present body,” adding that temporary changes to the bodily self, such as embodying a childlike version of the face, enhance access to childhood memories, possibly because the brain encodes bodily information as part of event details.

Professor Jane Aspell, co-author of the study, said, “When our childhood memories were formed, we had a different body,” emphasizing that the findings indicate the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, and that temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to distant memories.

These findings open promising avenues for using more advanced bodily illusions to trigger memories from different life stages, possibly even from early infancy, and may pave the way for developing interventions to help people with memory impairments.

The research was published in the prestigious scientific journal Scientific Reports, affiliated with Nature.