Two are better than one: Comparison influences infants’ visual recognition memory

Abstract

Despite a large literature on infants' memory for visually presented stimuli, the processes underlying visual memory are not well understood. Two studies with 4-month-old infants (N = 60) examined the effects of providing opportunities for comparison of items on infants' memory for those items. Experiment 1 revealed that 4-month-old infants failed to show evidence of memory for an item presented during familiarization in a standard task (i.e., when only one item was presented during familiarization). In Experiment 2, infants showed robust memory for one of two different items presented during familiarization. Thus, infants' memory for the distinctive features of individual items was enhanced when they could compare items.Infants can form memories for visual scenes and, with development, encode them faster and retain information for longer (see Fagan, 1990, for a review). Following 10-to 60-s of exposure to an item, 6-month-old infants consistently look longer at a novel stimulus than at the nowfamiliar stimulus (i.e., exhibiting a novelty preference) (Fagan, 1990). Younger infants, however, are less consistent, exhibiting novelty preferences (e.g., Pascalis, de Haan, Nelson, & de Schonen, 1998;Slater, Morison, & Rose, 1982), familiarity preferences (e.g., Richards, 1997;Rose, Gottfried, Mello-Carmina, & Bridger, 1982), or no clear preference (e.g., Wetherford & Cohen, 1973). Whether or not young infants exhibit a novelty preference depends on factors such as the amount of familiarization (Courage & Howe, 2001;Rose et al., 1982) and the particular stimuli (Fagan, 1974). Further, over repeated testing, infants exhibit familiarity preferences early in learning, and exhibit null or novelty preferences with more study time (e.g., Roder, Bushnell, & Sasseville, 2000). Indeed, Fagan (1990) concluded that the question "Can young infants demonstrate recognition memory?" can only be answered with "What are they being asked to recognize?" Because much or our knowledge about infants' visual memory comes from this task, it is critical to understand the processes that underlie novelty preferences. Rose and her colleagues (Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2004) have shown not only developmental differences in infants' memory in this task (e.g., how much encoding time is necessary for infants to remember an item), but also similarities between infants' and adults' memory. Two seminal studies identified one potentially important factor that contributes to young infants' novelty preference (Fagan, 1978;Rose et al., 1982). Although each involved several manipulations, both studies reported the counter-intuitive finding that infants familiarized with two different items showed stronger memory than did infants familiarized with only one item. This finding is counter-intuitive (Gentner & Gunn, 2001). In addition, older children and adults have better memory for distinctive items (e.g., Arndt & Reder, 2003;Healy, Shea, Kole, & Cunningham, 2008). Thus, the same processes seem to operate at very different points in development.Befor...

The importance of “what”: Infants use featural information to index events

“…One possibility is that co-occurrences of visual and spatial information are supporting the individuation of the objects, allowing two different sounds to be associated with two memory representations. Another possibility is that the objects are always individuated, even with minimal cues, but co-occurrences between multiple cues make the representations more robust in memory (e.g., Feigenson, 2005;Oakes, Kovack-Lesh, & Horst, 2009). In each case, however, infants are encoding visual features in indexing situations and are using this information to predict the appearance of an event.…”

Learned Labels Shape Pre‐speech Infants’ Object Representations

“…” (unlabeled). The experimenter explained to the caregiver that they should encourage their child to interact with both toys for an approximately equal amount of time, and that their child should be allowed to play with both toys at the same time (to encourage comparison, which promotes encoding; Gentner & Namy, 1999; Oakes, Kovack‐Lesh, & Horst, 2009). Infants heard the label approximately twice every 15 seconds.…”

Optimal Contrast: Competition Between Two Referents Improves Word Learning

“…Here too, studies across a wide range of topics suggest that too many competing items can disrupt learning (e.g., in wordlearning [Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010]; science learning in museum settings [Allen & Gutwill, 2004], target identification in rapid presentations [Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997], working memory [Carroll et al, 2010], and long-term memory [Axmacher, Haupt, Cohen, Elgar, & Fell, 2009]). On the other hand, the presence of multiple exemplars has also been shown to aid infants and children in forming categories (Graham, Namy, Gentner, & Meagher, 2010;Quinn & Tanaka, 2007;Waxman, Chambers, Yntema, & Gelman, 1989), remembering hidden objects (Oakes, Kovack-Lesh, & Horst, 2009), and in learning "deeper" relational information (Gentner & Namy, 1999). Thus, the role of competing options in helping or hindering learning remains an open question.…”