Visual short-term memory in the first year of life: capacity and recency effects.
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.
Rose
S A
SA
Department of Pediatrics,  Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Children's Hospital at Montefiore, Bronx, New York 10461, USA. srose@aecom.yu.edu
Feldman
J F
JF
Jankowski
J J
JJ
D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011446:Prospective Studies; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013997:Time Factors; D014743:Videotape Recording; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*