The effect of delayed feedback on infant learning reexamined.
The study reexamines the effect of delayed reinforcement upon contingency behavior in 6- to 8-month-old infants and attempts to account for the temporal discrepancy between span of integration and contingency memory. A modified delayed-reinforcement scheduling procedure enabled a previous methodological criticism to be discounted. The findings confirmed that whereas infants revealed reliable acquisition under immediate reinforcement, a 3-sec delay (whether reset or nonreset) precluded response acquisition, as did 6-sec and 10-sec delay of reinforcement. The findings are interpreted in terms of an informational-load hypothesis which relates short-term memory to the integration and/or segregation of multimodal input.
D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male