EXCEED THE SPACE PROVIDED. The proposal is to continue the study of infantile amnesia (viewed broadly as especially rapid forgetting of the events of infancy) with emphasis on age-specific encoding that might contribute to age-related differences in retention and forgetting.
The Aims seek to understand sources of infantile amnesia and to exploit experimental advantages of testing the learning and memory of neonatal rats in circumstances of substantial primacy and biological significance (the first postnatal meal).
Aim 1 is to assess effects of infantile encoding on memory for infancy. Two primary cases of infantile encoding in the rat ~ amodal encoding and integral or holistic processing ~ have precedent in the study of human cognitive development. When considered with other evidence, indications of different and often more effective learning by infants than older rats seem accountable by the infant's predisposition to employ these cases of encoding. In accord with a classic and still prevalent theory of infantile amnesia, proposed experiments will test retention of events of infancy after an age is reached at which neither the especially effective learning of infancy nor the hypothetical infantile encoding is active.
The second aim i s to expand our study of learning and memory at much younger ages than tested for Aim 1, with focus on the newborn rat. The newborn rat offers .special advantages - control over extra-experimental experience, minimal brain development at the time of learning, and maximal growth of the brain following learning - each of which has been implicated in theories of infantile amnesia. The newborn also provides a potentially extreme instance of infantile encoding, as well as a general model for plasticity in a period of rapid neurological change and vulnerability to neurological distortion by either endogenous sources (e.g., hormones) or toxins. Preliminary research, using a recently established procedure for testing associative learning in the newborn, indicates that the newborn's first meal can be accompanied by extremely effective learning that is robust against conventional challenges to retention, such as a trace interval, retention interval or counterconditioning. Proposed experiments will test the importance of the primacy of the newborn's first meal for such characteristics of learning and memory. This research has potential relevance for clinical issues associated with early traumatic memories, the origins of cognitive development, and contemporary theories of infantile amnesia. PERFORMANCE SITE ========================================Section End===========================================
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