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Exogenous attention influences visual short‐term memory in infants
Author(s) -
RossSheehy Shan,
Oakes Lisa M.,
Luck Steven J.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00992.x
Subject(s) - cued speech , psychology , perception , visual short term memory , context (archaeology) , visual perception , cognitive psychology , task (project management) , developmental psychology , short term memory , cognition , audiology , working memory , neuroscience , medicine , paleontology , management , biology , economics
Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants’ Visual Short‐Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five‐ and 10‐month‐old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square changed color and one square was cued; sometimes the cued item was the changing item, and sometimes the changing item was not the cued item. Ten‐month‐old infants exhibited enhanced memory for the cued item when the cue was a spatial pre‐cue (Experiment 1) and 5‐month‐old infants exhibited enhanced memory for the cued item when the cue was relative motion (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate for the first time that infants younger than 6 months can encode information in VSTM about individual items in multiple‐object arrays, and that attention‐directing cues influence both perceptual and VSTM encoding of stimuli in infants as in adults.