One of the most important accomplishments of infancy is the ability to recall events. Through studies using imitation and electrophysiological measures, we have greatly increased our understanding of how the capacity for long-term memory for events develops, there are still several questions unanswered. Research on the emergence of long-term memory suggests that the ability to remember events over delays of several weeks or even months emerges at the end of the first year of life, and that there are strong individual differences in both behavioral and electrophysiological measures of this ability. In particular, it seems that infants' ability to consolidate events that are to be remembered undergoes significant development at the end of the first year of life, and that this ability in particular reflects strong individual differences. Despite these advances, we know little about why consolidation abilities emerge at very different times in development in individual infants. The primary purpose of this proposal is to provide infants with experience imitating events and determine how such experiences affect infants' long-term recall ability, as measured by event-related potentials. We will provide one group of infants with experience interacting with their caregivers using an imitation toy at 5 months of age. Two control groups will also be tested. In one control group, infants will have experience interacting with their caregivers with a toy, but that toy will not be one that with which infants and parents can engage in """"""""imitation games"""""""". The third group will receive a solitary toy that the infants can play with, but that is not interactive. In this way, we can gauge the relative importance of experience with toys that are specifically relevant to the task used to assess memory development (imitation) and experience with triadic interactions with the caregiver without imitation. We predict that infants in the group who get experience with imitation toys will perform better than controls on later imitation measures of long-term memory. In addition, if such experience affects the development of the underlying brain system, we also expect these infants to show brain activity patterns that are consistent with relatively more mature development of the explicit memory system. The main purpose of the proposed project is to investigate how experiences influence the development of early memory systems in infants. We will provide 5-month-old infants with different kinds of memory experience in the home. Using measures of behavior and brain activity, we will investigate what effect these different experiences have on the development of long-term memory later in the first year of life. ? ? ? ?
| Carver, Leslie J (2011) Effects of viewing ordered pictorial reminders on long-term memory in the first year of life. Memory 19:871-8 |
