The effect of repeated reactivations on memory specificity in infancy.
The cues that reactivate forgotten memories of young infants are highly specific. At the time of initial reminding, if either the cue or context differs from that originally present during encoding, then the memory is not recovered. In three experiments, we asked whether this specificity decreases over repeated reactivations. Three-month-old infants, trained in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm with a particular cue in a particular context, received multiple reactivation treatments after their training memory was forgotten; either the cue or the context was changed during the final reminder. For a given age of the memory, context specificity was eliminated after fewer retrievals than cue specificity, and the number of retrievals required to eliminate specificity interacted with the age of the memory. These results confirm that different memory attributes become inaccessible at different rates and that repeatedly retrieved and older memories are likely to be less detailed. This transformation may underlie reconstructive memory in linguistic individuals.
Hitchcock
D F
DF
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA.
Rovee-Collier
C
C
D002657:Child Development; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D010775:Photic Stimulation