From birth on, infants show long-term recognition memory for persons. Furthermore, infants from six months onwards are able to store and retrieve demonstrated actions over long-term intervals in deferred imitation tasks. Thus, information about the model demonstrating the object-related actions is stored and recognition memory for the objects as…

Recent studies have shown 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 this phenomenon has been repeatedly demonstrated in adult animals, no studies to date have examined whether it occurs in infant animals, which…

Research over the past 2 decades has demonstrated that infants are equipped with remarkable computational abilities that allow them to find words in continuous speech. Infants can encode information about the transitional probability (TP) between syllables to segment words from artificial and natural languages. As previous research has tested…

Development and sex differentiation impart an organizational influence on the neuroanatomy and behavior of mammalian species. Prior studies suggest that brain regions associated with fear motivated defensive behavior undergo a protracted and sex-dependent development. Outside of adult animals, evidence for developmental sex differences in…

Assesses the long-term retention of conditioned operant footkicks by three-month-old infants. Views a conditioning analysis as a logical means by which to bridge the gap between animal and adult human models of memory. (Author/RH)

The medial temporal lobe memory system matures relatively early and supports rudimentary declarative memory in young infants. There is considerable development, however, in the memory processes that underlie declarative memory performance during infancy. Here we consider age-related changes in encoding, retention, and retrieval in the context of…

Four experiments explored the processes that bridge between referent selection and word learning. Twenty-four-month-old infants were presented with several novel names during a referent selection task that included both familiar and novel objects and tested for retention after a 5-min delay. The 5-min delay ensured that word learning was based on…

Children's memory of single infant experience was evaluated. At 6.5 months, infants participated in study of reaching in light and dark for sounding object. Children repeated dark procedure in laboratory when they were either one year or two years older. Older children with infant experience reached and grasped the sounding object significantly…

The influence of negative affect on the retrieval of information from memory during infancy was investigated in two studies through the use of an operant conditioning paradigm. The procedure used, known as "mobile conjugate reinforcement," involves a free operant task in which an infant is reinforced for footkicking by the movement of an…

This study of 20 3-month-old infants with Down's syndrome and 20 nondisabled infants found that both groups were successfully trained to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile by kicking, and displayed long-term retention a week later. Conditioning and retention-test performance of the two groups did not differ. (Author/JDD)

The ability of six-month-old infants to remember a functional category acquired in a specific context was assessed in three experiments. Findings revealed that at six months, information about the place where categories are constructed is prerequisite for retrieval of a category concept from long-term memory. (GLR)

Reviews three response rate measures (in a baseline measurement, immediately after acquisition, and at a long-term retention test) of infant memory that are used in experiments involving infants' conditioned kicking. Compares these measures to a new measure, the fraction of kicking rate remaining after the retention interval. Explains the…

We examined infants' long-term retention of a single unique emotional experience into early childhood. Twenty-month-olds who had participated in a still-face procedure at 5 months (experience group) fixated the face of the person who had instigated the still face significantly less than the faces of 2 other novel persons. Control 20-month-olds…

Two experiments used paired-comparisons to investigate 3-month olds' recognition of dynamic visual events after various retention intervals. Results indicated a changing pattern of attentional preferences over time consistent with models of infant recognition memory in which novelty, familiarity, and null preferences are considered conjointly and…

Three experiments examined characteristics of a stimulus-cueing retrieval from long-term memory for 3-month olds. Used mobiles displaying either Qs (feature-present stimuli) or Os (feature-absent stimuli) and tested 24 hours later. Findings indicated that target-distractor similarity constraints, whether or not a feature-present stimulus, would…