Human Actions Support Infant Memory

Abstract

Experiment 1 utilized an eye-tracking paradigm to test whether 9-month-old infants were more likely to remember a simple block tower built by a human agent or a mechanical claw.

Altercentric Cognition: How Others Influence Our Cognitive Processing

“…In a series of studies [73] it was found that memory (e.g., for words) was enhanced if participants were simply given the impression that similar others were also experiencing those stimuli. Furthermore, objects that are the targets of others' actions receive enhanced encoding [74]. These data suggest that the presence of others influences our basic memory for objects and events in our environment.…”

“…From early in life, infants exhibit many of the effects characteristic of altercentric perception, including gaze cueing [136,137], gaze following [138][139][140], enhanced memory and preference for the targets of others' attention [71,72,141,142] and action [74,143], behavioral mimicry [144], and altered expectations about the presence of objects if someone else has experienced that object's presence [61].…”

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

“…Unambiguous agency also increases the ability of older infants to learn statistical structure (Monroy et al, 2017), suggesting that the infant mind may prioritize agency. Indeed, infants are better at imitating a sequence of actions that have hierarchical versus arbitrary structure (Bauer and Mandler, 1989; Bauer, 1992) and show better memory for events that have a clear agent (Howard and Woodward, 2019), perhaps because of a propensity to segment events according to goals during encoding. Together, these results provide reason to believe that infants can represent high-level event structure from early ages.…”

“…Unambiguous agency also increases the ability of older infants to learn statistical structure [54] , suggesting that the infant mind may prioritize agency. Indeed, infants are better at imitating a sequence of actions that have hierarchical versus arbitrary structure [3,55] and show better memory for events that have a clear agent [56] , perhaps because of a propensity to segment events according to goals during encoding. Our findings of seemingly mature temporal processing windows in higher-order but not visual regions in infancy suggests that coarser event representations may precede fine-grained representations.…”

Altercentric cognition: how others influence our cognitive processing

“…Indeed, there are other examples of dedicated social systems that are overextended to a broader category of similar stimuli [135]. From early in life, infants exhibit many of the effects characteristic of altercentric perception, including gaze cueing [136,137], gaze following [138][139][140], enhanced memory and preference for the targets of others' attention [71,72,141,142] and action [74,143], behavioral mimicry [144], and altered expectations about the presence of objects if someone else has experienced that object's presence [61].…”