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State‐Dependent Memory in Infants
Author(s) -
Seehagen Sabine,
Schneider Silvia,
Sommer Katharina,
La Rocca Laura,
Konrad Carolin
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.13444
Subject(s) - crying , psychology , encoding (memory) , cognition , task (project management) , imitation , state dependent , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , neuroscience , social psychology , mathematics , management , mathematical economics , economics
Why do infants remember some things and not others? Human infants frequently cycle through different states such as calm attentiveness, wakeful activity, and crying. Given that cognitive processes do not occur in isolation, such fluctuations in internal state might influence memory processing. In the present experiment, declarative memory in 9‐month‐old infants ( N = 96) was heavily state dependent. Infants exhibited excellent retention of a deferred imitation task after a 15‐min delay if their state at encoding was identical to their state at retrieval (e.g., calm). Infants failed to exhibit retention if their state at encoding was different from their state at retrieval (e.g., calm vs. animated). Infant memory processing depends on internal cues.