Infant Memory Flashcards
(9 cards)
What Babies Can Do
- Visual acuity skills strong enough for looking at pictures, attracted to novel stimuli (visual paired comparison)
Suck on a pacifier reflex
- Cat in the hat study
Kick their feet
- Used with operant conditioning task
Manipulating objects
- Deferred imitation tasks, show how toy works and then given toy back to see if they know how to use
Use behaviours that are the DVS to measure memory
Visual Paired Comparison Tasks
- Familiarisation or habituation
- Delay/retention interval
- Testing familiar stimulus is paired with a novel stimulus
- Memories have a novel preference
- Forgetting or loss of memory have a null preference
Operant Condition With High Amplitude Sucking Tasks
Infants learn the contingency between their sucking behaviour and reinforcement
- Change sucking based on what they hear
- If heard in utero or from mother then sucking increases
Infants learn the contingency between their kicking behaviour and movement in an overhead mobile (ie reinforcement)
- Whenever they would kick, their mobile crib stand would move
- They associated moving their feet with changes to the mobile crib
- The study started with a bassline reaction (how much they would do the action naturally), meaning the baby’s foot was connected to a mobile stand with nothing on it. After that, they would attach the crib toys and the baby would begin to learn, changing their response
Deferred Imitation with Puppet Task
- More useful for babies over 6 months
- 6-18 months generally
- Grey and pink puppets have detachable mittens that have a bell to shake and then can be placed back (3 actions)
- They would then demonstrate these 3 actions to the baby, without explaining what they are doing or letting them play and practice with it beforehand (no verbal or practice cues)
- Get baby to play with the puppet
- 6 month olds need to be shown the action 6 times to remember all of the 3 actions shown to them after 24 hours
- 12 month olds need to be shown the action 3 times to remember all of the 3 actions shown to them after 24 hours
- After 24 hours they are given 90 seconds to play and remember how to use it
Compared demonstration with bassline
- If not shown they very rarely find out how to use it
- This means the demonstration group uses their memory to know what to do
Types of Memory Development
→ encoding
- Initial learning
- Older infants learn faster than younger infants
→ retention
- Remember after delay
- Older infants remember for longer than younger infants
→ retrieval
- how good memory is after changes to context or cues around when that memory was formed
- Older infants are better able to retrieve memories in different situations than are younger infants
Mobile Conjugate Reinforcement and the Train Task
- Attach mobile to a stand, each time the mobile kicks, the mobile jumps
- Baby learned contingency between foot kicks and mobile movement
- Baby eventually outgrow mobile conjugate
- At 6 months they created a train set
- Baby learned every time they push a lever the train will move slightly
- In the mobile task it was conjugate but this was not
Mobile Conjugate Process
Session 1 and 2
- Training - 1 min kicking → 6 min reinforcement → 1 min kicking
- Delay period (for memory change) -
Session 3
- 1 min kicking → 6 min reinforcement → 1 min kicking
To see if there is retrieval/retention improving their performance
- Bassline ratio - number of times kicked during immediate test/ bassline
Mobile and Train Task Combined
- 2-6 month mobile
- 6-18 train
- 6 month olds do just as well at mobile and train tasks
- Rate of learning is about the same
Results with retrieval
- Changing the cues or context
- These researchers changed the context of the mobile task, crib is covered in a striped sheet as opposed to a spotted one
- If conditioned in striped sheet and then placed back in striped sheet then their retrieval is the exact same, if not then it drops considerably, retention is completely by chance
- In different position, then it improves slightly, suggesting that in a familiar setting it will improve slightly
- Don’t remember anything without context cues
- Memory is specific to the training/test context
2 month olds remember for 24 hours, 3 month olds remember for 1 week, 6 months for 2 weeks
Experimenter presented different extents of moving the mobile for the baby to remember
- The only time the baby remembered, was when the mobile was moved at a similar rate to when the baby moved it
- Reactivation only works if the stimulus behaves exactly the same as the initial training conditions – specificity
