The ontogeny of long-term memory over the first year-and-a-half of life.
This research documents the development of long-term memory in human infants from 2 months through the end of the first year-and-a-half of life. In the initial study phase, we trained 6- to 18-month-old human infants in an operant task and tested them after increasing delays until they exhibited no retention for 2 successive weeks. In the second phase, their data were combined with data previously obtained from 2- to 6-month-olds in an equivalent task. The resulting function revealed that the duration of retention increases monotonically between 2 and 18 months of age. This increase was not due to age differences in original learning. This is the first systematic analysis of the course of long-term memory across an extended period of infant development that is based on standardized parameters of training and testing. It provides a reference function against which measures of retention from infants of different ages that are obtained in different memory tasks with different parameters can be meaningfully compared.
Hartshorn
K
K
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA.
Rovee-Collier
C
C
Gerhardstein
P
P
Bhatt
R S
RS
Wondoloski
T L
TL
Klein
P
P
Gilch
J
J
Wurtzel
N
N
Campos-de-Carvalho
M
M
D000367:Age Factors; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012016:Reference Values; D012153:Retention, Psychology