This proposal is to continue and expand the application of a condition-analysis in the study of memory in 8-16 week old infants. In the prior grant period it was found that the context within which training occurs exerts control over the subsequent expression of conditioned responding with considerable specificity and can function as a reminder. Only after infants were explicitly trained with a series of different stimuli did their responding generalize to novel retrieval cues. The PI now seeks to exploit this specificity in examining, through the use of reactivation procedures and retention tests in altered contexts, the nature of the predictive relations, or associations, that infants acquire in variable and constant training contexts. The malleability of memories and the long-term effects of repeated exposures to retrieval cues will also be assessed. This research is designed to provide an extensive and systematic analysis of the basic learning and memory processes in the human infant as a starting point for a comparative analysis of factors that influence learning and retention at different points of development. In this way the PI seeks to bridge the gap between research with nonverbal organisms in the tradition of general experimental psychology and that which has emerged from the study of adult verbal learning and memory. Byproducts of this research will include a consideration and analysis of how infants structure or organize memories and the determinants of infantile amnesia.
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