title: Exogenous attention influences visual short-term memory in infants.
abstract: Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants' Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five- and 10-month-old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square changed color and one square was cued; sometimes the cued item was the changing item, and sometimes the changing item was not the cued item. Ten-month-old infants exhibited enhanced memory for the cued item when the cue was a spatial pre-cue (Experiment 1) and 5-month-old infants exhibited enhanced memory for the cued item when the cue was relative motion (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate for the first time that infants younger than 6 months can encode information in VSTM about individual items in multiple-object arrays, and that attention-directing cues influence both perceptual and VSTM encoding of stimuli in infants as in adults.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. shannon-ross@uiowa.edu
authors.forename: Shannon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ross-Sheehy
authors.forename: Lisa M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Oakes
authors.forename: Steven J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Luck
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*