Ontogeny of early event memory: I. Forgetting and retrieval by 2- and 3-month-olds

Greco, Carolyn; Rovee‐Collier, Carolyn; Hayne, Harlene; Griesler, Pamela C.; Earley, Linda

doi:10.1016/0163-6383(86)90017-2

Cited by 111 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Early studies of rat pups conditioned to avoid a shockpaired compartment showed that young animals forget much faster than older ones (Campbell and Campbell, 1962). These findings were subsequently replicated, using a range of learning paradigms, in multiple species that undergo extensive postgestational development, suggesting that rapid forgetting that parallels infantile amnesia is an evolutionarily conserved phenomenon (Campbell and Jaynes, 1966;Feigley and Spear, 1970;Schulenburg et al, 1971;Steinert et al, 1980;Greco et al, 1986;Anderson et al, 2004).…”

Section: Infantile Amnesia and Explanatory Hypotheses Proposed To Datementioning

confidence: 57%

“…Experimental evidence has shown that rapid infantile forgetting cannot be explained by insufficient learning: infant and young animals learn similarly to, and in specific tasks even better than, adult animals, but forget significantly more rapidly (Kirby, 1963;Feigley and Spear, 1970;Campbell and Spear, 1972;Greco et al, 1986). What causes this rapid forgetting?…”

Section: Infantile Amnesia and Explanatory Hypotheses Proposed To Datementioning

confidence: 99%

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Infantile Amnesia: A Critical Period of Learning to Learn and Remember

2017

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Infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories, is associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood. It has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the underdevelopment of the infant brain, which would preclude memory consolidation, or to deficits in memory retrieval. Although early memories are inaccessible to adults, early-life events, such as neglect or aversive experiences, can greatly impact adult behavior and may predispose individuals to various psychopathologies. It remains unclear how a brain that rapidly forgets, or is not yet able to form long-term memories, can exert such a long-lasting and important influence. Here, with a particular focus on the hippocampal memory system, we review the literature and discuss new evidence obtained in rats that illuminates the paradox of infantile amnesia. We propose that infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period during which the learning system is learning how to learn and remember.The long-lasting influence of episodic infantile experiences and the paradox of infantile amnesia How do we develop our abilities to learn and remember facts, people, things, relationships, and places? These memories define our identities; they store autobiographical episodes that can be consciously declared, and are therefore termed declarative memories. Declarative memories include both the experience of specific things, people, and events of a given time and place (episodic memories), and general knowledge about the world (semantic memories). They are also known as explicit memories because they require conscious recollection (Graf and Schacter, 1985). These are the memories that are lost in Alzheimer's disease or aging-related memory impairment. Parallels of these memories exist in nonhuman animals and include contextual, spatial, and episodic memories (Ergorul and Eichenbaum, 2004). Collectively, such memories store information about "who, what, when and where," and are therefore termed "wwww" memories. In both humans and nonhuman mammals, wwww memories are processed by the hippocampus-dependent (or medial temporal lobe-dependent) learning and memory system (Eichenbaum, 2006; Squire and Wixted, 2011;Lavenex and Banta Lavenex, 2013;Albani et al., 2014).A large body of clinical and behavioral evidence has demonstrated the critical importance of infantile episodic experiences for brain function throughout life. However, little is known about the biological mechanisms underlying the development of the hippocampus-dependent learning and memory system. Many studies have shown that hippocampus-dependent memories (also referred to as hippocampal memories) are severely compromised by challenges occurring early in life. These challenges may be either psychological (e.g., trauma, neglect, or deprivation of social experience) or biological (e.g., the impact of genetic mutations on development). All of these events can predispose individuals to psychopathologies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality ...

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Section: Infantile Amnesia and Explanatory Hypotheses Proposed To Datementioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Infantile Amnesia and Explanatory Hypotheses Proposed To Datementioning

confidence: 99%

Infantile Amnesia: A Critical Period of Learning to Learn and Remember

2017

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“…Delays longer than 3 weeks after training were not used in Experiment 2 because previous studies have shown that a 3-min (180-s) reactivation treatment also recovers the forgotten memory after 4 weeks (Hayne, 1990;Hayne & Findlay, 1995;Rovee-Collier et al, 1980), which is the upper limit of reactivation at this age (Greco, Rovee-Collier, Hayne, Griesler, & Earley, 1986;Hartshorn, Wilk, Muller, & Rovee-Collier, 1998).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Joh¹,

Sweeney²,

Rovee‐Collier³

2001

Developmental Psychobiology

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Brie¯y exposing subjects to an isolated component of an event after they have forgotten can reactivate their memory of it, leading to renewed retention on an ensuing test. In two experiments with forty-eight 3-month-old infants, we asked what minimum duration of a reactivation treatment could recover their forgotten memory of an operant mobile task and whether the minimum duration was affected by how long the memory was forgotten. In Experiment 1, the minimum duration for reactivating the memory 1 week after forgetting was 120 sÐsubstantially longer than the minimum duration required for reactivation at 6 months after the same relative delay. In Experiment 2, the minimum effective duration for reactivation increased linearly with the time since forgetting, from 7.5 s after 1 day to 180 s after 3 weeks. This study reveals that the duration of an effective memory prime is directly related to age and to memory accessibility. ß

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“…Though infants' memory can be reactivated after forgetting has occurred, substituting more than one component of the five-component training mobile with a novel component produced ineffective reactivation in 3-month-olds in a two-week long-term retention test. The same effects have been found with 2-month-olds after a retention interval of only 24 hours (Hayne, Greco, Earley, Griesler & Rovee-Collier, 1986). …”

Section: Asupporting

confidence: 70%

“…Forgetting and memory retrieval in 2-month-olds was further investigated by Greco, Rovee-Collier, Hayne, Griesler and Earley (1986). After two training sessions, subjects received a retention interval of 1, 3, 6 or 9 days.…”

Section: Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory for contingent versus noncontingent events

Cigales¹

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Ontogeny of early event memory: I. Forgetting and retrieval by 2- and 3-month-olds

Cited by 111 publications

References 22 publications

Infantile Amnesia: A Critical Period of Learning to Learn and Remember

Infantile Amnesia: A Critical Period of Learning to Learn and Remember

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Memory for contingent versus noncontingent events

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