This research will examine the development of conceptual thought and the ability to recall the past in infancy and early childhood. To date, we still have little information about the way infants conceptualize the world or how long they can recall events that have happened to them. The phenomenon known as child amnesia, in which adults recall little or nothing about their early years, suggests that infants may not be able to recall events for very long. At the same time, there is a small amount of evidence suggesting that two-year-olds can recall events that occurred when they were one year of age. This research program will use deferred imitation, in which children are asked to imitate events they observed in the past, to measure recall in children too young to talk. The expectation, based on pilot work, is that this research will demonstrate that the cause of childhood amnesia is not an inability to store and remember events as they occur in infancy. There has also been little experimental work on concept formation in infancy. It has been suggested that infants first form very simple concepts, of such things as dogs, chairs, and cars, and only later develop broader concepts of animals, furniture, and vehicles. This research will use several techniques to investigate this hypothesis. One procedure will use an object- manipulation task, in which one-year-olds show, by the order in which they touch objects put in front of them, whether they consider them to be related or not. Another procedure will use an object-exploration task, in which the amount of exploration of a new object is used to estimate whether the infant considers it to be related to objects previously explored. Based on work already accomplished, it is expected that infants' understanding of concepts such as animals and vehicles will be found to be more similar to those of older children and adults than has been thought traditionally to be the case. The overall goal of the research is to provide a systematic body of knowledge and a coherent theory about the early foundations of thinking and remembering.
