title: Deconstructing the reactivation of imitation in young infants.
abstract: Reactivation is an automatic, perceptual process in which exposure to components of a forgotten event alleviates forgetting. Most research on infant memory reactivation has used conditioning paradigms. We used the puppet imitation task to systematically examine which stimuli could retrieve 6-month-olds' forgotten memory of the modeled actions. Infants watched an adult model a sequence of actions on a puppet, imitated the actions, and were exposed to reactivation cues 24 hr before a 7-day (Experiment 1) or 14-day (Experiment 2) retention test. Exposure to any component of the original event reactivated the memory during the 7-day test, but two of the same components failed to alleviate forgetting during the 14-day test. Increasing the number of retrieval cues facilitated 14-day test performance. These findings reveal that the principles of reactivation are the same for conditioning and imitation paradigms: The necessary and sufficient conditions for memory reactivation are directly related to memory accessibility.
authors: Department of Psychology, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ.
authors: Amy E
authors: AE
authors: Learmonth
authors: Kimberly
authors: K
authors: Cuevas
authors: Carolyn
authors: C
authors: Rovee-Collier
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall; D010988:Play and Playthings / Q000523:psychology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012153:Retention, Psychology / Q000502:physiology
keywords: automatic processing; imitation; infants; memory attributes; reactivation; retrieval failure