title: Occlusions at event boundaries during encoding have a negative effect on infant memory.
abstract: The present study investigated the importance of Event Boundaries for 16- and 20-month-olds' (n=80) memory for cartoons. The infants watched one out of two cartoons with ellipses inserted covering the screen for 3s either at Event Boundaries or at Non-Boundaries. After a two-week delay both cartoons (one familiar and one novel) were presented simultaneously without ellipses while eye-tracking the infants. According to recent evidence a familiarity preference was expected. However, following Event Segmentation Theory ellipses at Event Boundaries were expected to cause greater disturbance of the encoding and hence a weaker memory trace evidenced by reduced familiarity preference, relative to ellipses at Non-Boundaries. The results suggest that overall this was the case, documenting the importance of Boundaries for infant memory. Furthermore, planned analyses revealed that whereas the same pattern was found when looking at the 20-month-old infants, no significant difference was found between the two conditions in the youngest age-group.
authors.affiliation: Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. Electronic address: trines@psy.au.dk.
authors.forename: Trine
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sonne
authors.affiliation: Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. Electronic address: osman@psy.au.dk.
authors.forename: Osman S
authors.initials: OS
authors.lastname: Kingo
authors.affiliation: Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. Electronic address: peter@psy.au.dk.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Krøjgaard
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Cartoons; Episode; Event segmentation; Eye-tracking; Infant memory