Visual short-term memory in the first year of life: Capacity and recency effects.

Abstract

A span task was developed to assess the amount of information infants could hold in short-term memory. In this task, infants were presented with up to 4 items in succession and then tested for recognition by successively pairing each item with a novel one. A large sample of full-terms and low-birth-weight preterms (< 1,750 g) was tested longitudinally, at 5, 7, and 12 months of age. Results were similar for both groups: (a) Longer spans were more difficult, especially at the 2 younger ages; (b) memory capacity increased over the 1st year of life--whereas less than 25% of the sample could hold as many as 3-4 items in mind at once at the younger ages, nearly half could do so by 12 months of age; (c) there was a marked recency effect (greater memory for the final item) for spans of 3 and 4 at all ages; and (d) there were modest cross-age correlations, indicating that individual differences in memory capacity showed some stability from age to age.

Hold your horses: How exposure to different items influences infant categorization

“…Detecting similarities and differences between items encountered at different times requires that the memory for one item is compared with a second item currently in view. Because young infants' shorter-term memory abilities are limited (Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2001; Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003) and their longer-term memories are less detailed than are the longer-term memories of older infants (Wilk, Klein, & Rovee-Collier, 2001), young infants may not make effective comparisons between a remembered item and another item. Indeed, Needham and her colleagues observed that infants detected different commonalities among items as a function of the amount of time between encounters with those items.…”

Relations between nonverbal cognitive ability and spoken language development : implications for deaf toddlers who use cochlear implants.

“…Specifically, they did not demonstrate recognition memory, despite the fact that the current paradigm was based on that used in Rose et al (2001). Importantly, there was a major methodological difference between the current study and that in Rose et al (2001).…”

“…Specifically, they did not demonstrate recognition memory, despite the fact that the current paradigm was based on that used in Rose et al (2001). Importantly, there was a major methodological difference between the current study and that in Rose et al (2001). In particular, Rose and colleagues used real three-dimensional objects in their recognition memory task, whereas static images of three-dimensional objects were used in the current study.…”

“…Recognition memory requires learning to attend to some features (e.g .. shape) while ignoring others (e.g .. color) in order to form perceptual categories. Rose and colleagues have found that better information processing is correlated with better visual recognition memory and consequently better cognitive outcomes (Rose & Feldman, 1997;Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2001). Rose has argued that children's abstraction of perceptual features forms the basis for concepts of objects and that these concepts need to be in place before language may be acquired (Rose et aI., 1991).…”

“…The target images were in either a series of two or three (spans) and the percentage of time looking at the new image was calculated (see Rose et aL 2001). This preference for looking at the new image is taken to indicate short term memory, or visual recognition memory.…”