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Does infant memory expression reflect age at encoding or age at retrieval?
Author(s) -
Hartshorn Kristin,
RoveeCollier Carolyn
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
developmental psychobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.055
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1098-2302
pISSN - 0012-1630
DOI - 10.1002/dev.10101
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , encoding (memory) , psychology , developmental psychology , human memory , context dependent memory , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , cognition , biology , recall , free recall , paleontology
Do human infants express a memory acquired earlier in ontogeny in a manner appropriate to their age at encoding or their age at the time of retrieval? To answer this, we exploited the fact that retention is highly context dependent at 6 months but not at 8–9 months of age. Six‐month‐olds learned an operant response in one context, and their memory was maintained by monthly reinstatements in the original context. At 8 or 9 months of age, 1 month after the last (or only) reinstatement, infants were tested in either the same or a different context. During testing, infants' retention was no longer context dependent; rather, they responded robustly in both test contexts. These results revealed that infants expressed a memory acquired when they were younger in a manner appropriate to their test age. They were interpreted in terms of changes in the functional significance of context before and after infants self‐locomote. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 42: 283–291, 2003.