Memories formed in adolescence can become temporarily locked away by the brain’s own remodeling process, according to new research from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

The study, led by senior author Jelena Radulovic, M.D., Ph.D., director of Einstein’s PRIME program and the Sylvia and Robert S. Olnick Chair in Neuroscience, and lead author Hui Zhang, Ph.D., examined a brain region called the retrosplenial cortex in mice. The researchers found that perineuronal nets — protective, mesh-like structures that stabilize memory circuits — unexpectedly diminish during late adolescence, then rebuild once adulthood arrives. The changes were confined to the retrosplenial cortex and were not observed in the nearby hippocampus.

In behavioral tests, mice trained during adolescence to fear a foot shock lost that fear response weeks later — but the memory wasn’t erased. It resurfaced when the mice were tested in a different environment. The team traced the effect to a decline in structural proteins along with a growth factor called TGFβ2; restoring TGFβ2, or reinforcing the perineuronal nets directly, restored the mice’s ability to retrieve the memory. By adulthood, the memories that resurfaced were less precise than before, generalized across contexts — a pattern that echoes the “reminiscence bump,” a well-documented tendency for people to recall adolescence and early adulthood more vividly than other life stages.

The researchers note, cautiously, that the same window of cortical instability in adolescence coincides with when conditions like schizophrenia and major depression often first emerge, though they stress this connection is speculative and needs substantially more research.

The study’s additional Einstein authors include Zorica Petrovic, Elizabeth M. Wood, Ana Cicvaric, Maayan Krispil-Alon, Kendra Parker, Thomas E. Bassett, Anna Carboncino, and J. Tiago Goncalves, with further collaborators at Northwestern University and the University of Haifa. The work was supported by NIH grants R01MH108837 and R01MH078064, and by US-Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant 2019261.

Journal: PLOS Biology
Article Title: “Retrosplenial Cortical Reorganization During Late Adolescence Introduces Instability of Contextual Memory Circuits”
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003908
Publication Date: 17-Jul-2026

Source: EurekAlert