How that which we remember is selectively distorted by new information was studied in 3-month-old infants who learned to move a particular crib mobile by operant foot kicking. Infants who were passively exposed to a novel mobile 1, 2, or 3 days later subsequently treated the novel mobile as if they had actually been trained with it. Also, after the longest exposure delay, they no longer recognized the original mobile. Likewise, when the novel mobile was exposed after the longest delay, it could prime the forgotten training memory in a reactivation paradigm, but the original mobile no longer could. These data reveal that what we remember about an event is selectively distorted by what we encounter later. Moreover, the later in the retention interval we encounter new postevent information, the greater is its impact on retention.

In eyewitness testimony research, postevent information impairs retention of the original event and increases the probability that interpolated information will be identified as part of the original event. The present experiments studied these effects with 3-month-olds. Infants learned to kick to move a particular crib mobile and then were briefly exposed to information about a novel mobile. The novel postevent information impaired recognition ofthe original mobile when it immediately followed training but not when it was delayed by 1 day. Like adults, infants treated the postevent information as part of the original training event, continuing to do so for at least 2 weeks. We propose that postevent information displaces conflicting information coactive with it in primary memory and creates a new, updated memory token of the event. Once the new token leaves primary memory, however, it is protected; only a copy can be retrieved and modified in the future.

The present studies were designed to examine the role of place cues in memory retrieval during early infancy. Three-month-old infants were trained to move a mobile by kicking. Two weeks later, memory retrieval was disrupted ifthey were reminded in a location or place different from where they had been trained, but not if they were reminded in the same place (Experiment lA). The same result was obtained even though highly salient cues in their immediate visual surround remained unchanged during reminding (Experiments IB and lC). No disruption was seen, however, when retrieval was cued in a different place after only 1 day (Experiment 2). These findings unequivocally demonstrate that infants as young as 3 months encode incidental information about the place where an event occurs and suggest that early memories are buffered against retrieval in potentially inappropriate contexts over the long term.Most theories of human memory propose that information about the place where an event occurs is represented in the memory of that event and is critical in its subsequent retrieval (e.g.,