HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1 PSYCHOLOGY 3050: Memory Development 1 Ch10

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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1
PSYCHOLOGY 3050 Memory Development 1
(Ch10)
Dr. Jamie Drover SN-3094, 737-8383 e-mail --
jrdrover_at_mun.ca Winter Semester, 2009
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Last Class

• Knowledge of objects
• Object Constancy (Slater, Mattock, Brown, 1990)
• Continuation (Kellman Spelke, 1983)
• Support (Baillargeon et al., 1995)
• Object Permanence (Newcombe et al., 1999)
• Early knowledge may be implicit.
• Hood et al. (2000)
• Newcombe et al. (2000)
• Is knowledge of objects innate?
• Representational or architectural innateness.
• No (Bogartz et al., 1998)

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Memory Development

• Memories can be retrieved in different ways.
• Recognition a stimulus is presented and one must
  determine whether it is new or old.
• Young children do well on recognition tasks.
• Recall information that is not currently
  perceived must be retrieved from memory.
• Cued Recall retrieval is prompted by an
  environmental context or cue.

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Memory Development

• Free recall no external cue is presented.

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Memory Development in Infancy Preference for
Novelty as an Indication of Memory

• Usually assessed using the habituation/
  dishabituation paradigm.
• Researchers also use preference-for-novelty
  paradigms.
• Infants are shown a novel stimulus and a
  familiarized one.
• Preference for the novel stimulus is seen as
  memory for the familiar one.

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Memory Development in Infancy Preference for
Novelty as an Indication of Memory

• Fagan (1973, 1974) found that 5- and 6-month-olds
  will show visual memories for stimuli following
  brief exposures.
• These memories can last two weeks.
• Spence (1996) had mothers of 1-month-olds read
  nursery rhymes over a 2 week period.
• Using the sucking rate paradigm, infants will
  adjust sucking rate to hear the familiar rhyme
  even after a 3 day delay.

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Memory Development in Infancy Conjugate
Reinforcement Procedure

• Rovee-Collier (1999) tied a ribbon to an infants
  ankle and connected it to a mobile.

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Memory Development in Infancy Conjugate
Reinforcement Procedure

• In the first 3 minutes, the ribbon is not
  connected to the mobile (baseline
  nonreinforcement).
• In the next 9 minutes, the ribbon and mobile are
  connected.
• Following delays, infants are placed back in the
  crib and their foot is connected to the ribbon.
• If they show a high kicking rate, it reflects
  memory.

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Memory Development in Infancy Conjugate
Reinforcement Procedure

• 3-month-olds were tested using this procedure.
• They showed no forgetting after 8 days.
• In related research, 8-week-olds showed that they
  could retain these memories for 2 weeks.
• Rovee-Collier has also focused on the role of
  context in memory
• How similar must the learning environment and
  testing environment be to remember?

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Memory Development in Infancy Conjugate
Reinforcement Procedure

• Infants were seated in a playpen with a very
  distinctive cloth.
• Infants underwent the standard kicking training.
• For the test, infants could be placed in the same
  context (same cloth) or in a different context
  (different cloth).
• When in the same context, infants demonstrate far
  better retention.

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How Long Do Infants Memories Last?

• Older infants have been tested with the train
  task.
• Infants sit in front of a miniature train set and
  learn that they can move the train around by
  pressing a lever.
• Infants are tested after a delay by sitting in
  front of the lever which is now not connected to
  the train.

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How Long Do Infants Memories Last?

• Infants memories last longer with age.

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How Long Do Infants Memories Last?

• Infants long-term memory has been tested using
  deferred imitation.
• Infants can remember novel actions for as long as
  one year.
• Bauer (2002) tested infants with a 3-step task.
• Placed a bar across two posts
• Hung a plate from the bar
• Struck the plate with a mallet

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How Long Do Infants Memories Last?

• Following delays, infants were given the
  materials and tested for deferred imitation.
• Rate of deferred imitation was higher in older
  children.
• Older children can handle longer delays.

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How Long Do Infants Memories Last?

• Deferred imitation likely relies on several brain
  areas
• hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, structures within
  the temporal lobe.
• The hippocampus underlies the earliest deferred
  imitation.
• To retain information following long delays,
  these areas need to mature and coalesce.

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Infantile Amnesia

• The inability to recall information from early
  childhood.
• We are unable to remember events that happened
  before we were 3.5 or 4 years of age.
• We lack autobiographical memories.
• Personal and long-lasting memories which are the
  basis for ones personal life history.
• Usher and Neisser (1993) found that the earliest
  memory for college students was about 2 years of
  age.

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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?

• Two explanations.
• Information is not stored for long-term retention
  before 2 years of age.
• The information is encoded differently.
• The second explanation is more likely.
• When we are older, our minds are no longer like
  those of infants.
• We now use verbal symbols.

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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?

• Infants are tested on recall motor memories,
  whereas children and adults are tested on verbal
  memories.
• Infants can not convert memories into verbal
  memories.
• Simcock and Hayne (2002) showed children (27-39
  months) sequences of actions and interviewed them
  6 and 12 months later.

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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?
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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?

• Although they had the verbal ability, children
  did not use it to describe the previous
  experience.
• They did so only if they had the vocabulary to
  describe the event when it was experienced.
• More verbally sophisticated children at the time
  of the initial test verbally recalled the event.
• Children could not translate earlier preverbal
  experiences into language.

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Last Class

• Memory Development in Infancy
• Preference Novelty Fagan
• Mobile Task Rovee-Collier
• Context cues Rovee-Collier
• How Long do Memories Last?
• Train Task
• Deferred Imitation Bauer (2002)
• Infantile Amnesia Lack autobiographical
  memories.
• May be language-related Simcock Hayne (2002)

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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?

• But why can 3- and 4-year-olds recount verbally
  events that happened years before.
• Howe and Courage (1993) believe that in order to
  lay down and retrieve autobiographical memories,
  a sense of self is needed.
• This develops in the preschool years.
• Unless events can be related to the self, they
  can not be retrieved later.

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Why Cant We Remember Early Events?

• Perhaps infantile amnesia can be explained by the
  fuzzy-trace theory.
• Young children attempt to encode verbatim
  (precise) memories, whereas older children rely
  on gist (meaning) memories.
• Verbatim memories are more easily forgotten.
• They are unavailable later in childhood and
  adulthood.

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Implicit Memory

• Unconscious memories. Memory without awareness.
• Implicit and explicit memories appear to be
  governed by different brain systems.
• The hippocampus is involved with explicit
  memories.
• There appear to be few age differences on
  implicit memory.

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Implicit Memory

• Researchers test this using fragmented pictures
  that the child has to identify.
• Children are shown a series of degraded pictures
  and later given another task involving those
  pictures.
• Children perform the second task better even
  though they may not remember the earlier
  pictures.
• There are few age differences.

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Implicit Memory

• Hayes and Hennessy (1996) showed 4-, 5-, and
  10-year-old children a series of pictures on one
  day and asked them to identify the picture or
  asked to answer questions about the item.
• Two days later, the children were showed some of
  the previous pictures and some new ones to
  identify in the fragmented picture task.

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Implicit Memory

• Older children identified more pictures and
  recognized more that they had seen earlier.
• The priming effect was equal for children of all
  ages.
• The degree to which they identified old pictures
  sooner than new pictures.

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Implicit Memory

• Newcombe and Fox (1994) showed 9- and
  10-year-olds pictures of 4- and 5-year-olds, some
  of whom were there classmates.
• They had to recognize their classmate (explicit
  memory) while their skin conductance was being
  measured (implicit memory).
• There was no difference on skin conductance
  between children who did well or poorly on the
  explicit task.

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The Development of Event Memory

• Things that happen to us during the course of
  everyday life.
• Its explicit, but encoding is unintentional.
• How do children remember events?
• The event must be attended and perceived.
• Young children pay attention to different aspects
  of an event than do adults.
• Children sometimes attend to trivial events.

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The Development of Event Memory

• Event memory is constructive in nature.
• We recall gist implying that we transform the
  event.
• Our memory for events is influenced by our
  previous knowledge.

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Last Class

• Infantile Amnesia
• Sense of self (Howe Courage, 1993)
• Fuzzy trace theory
• Implicit Memories
• Unconscious memories
• Fragmented Pictures/Priming Effect (Hayes
  Hennessy, 1996)
• Event memory
• Children attend to different aspects

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Script-Based Memory

• Preschool children organize their memory in terms
  of scripts.
• A form of schematic organization of real-world
  events organized in terms of their casual and
  temporal characteristics.
• Fast food restaurant script
• Young children and even pre-verbal infants appear
  to organize information temporally into scripts.

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Script-Based Memory

• Bauer and Mandler (1989) showed infants from 11.5
  to 20 months a sequence of events.
• Children were then given the materials.
• Children re-enacted the sequence of events in the
  same temporal order they had been shown.
• Because children use scripts they tend not to
  remember specific details.
• See Fivush and Hamond (1990) on p. 279.

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Script-Based Memory

• Children tend to recall routine information
  rather than novel aspects of a special event.
• Nelson (1996) believes that script-based memory
  has adaptive value by permitting children to
  predict the likelihood of events in the future.
• Memory is designed to retain information about
  frequent and recurrent events.

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Children as Eyewitnesses Age Differences

• In typical studies, children observe an event or
  activity and are not told that they will be asked
  to remember what they view.
• Later they are asked what they remember.
• They are asked free recall questions, cued recall
  questions, and recognition questions.

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How Much do They Remember, and How Accurate are
They?

• Preschool children remember only a small
  proportion of the event in response to
  free-recall questions.
• What they recall is highly accurate and central
  to the event.
• When given general cues, they recall more
  information more correct and incorrect facts.
• These false memories can persist after long
  delays and when asked to recognize.

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How Much do They Remember, and How Accurate are
They?

• False memories can not be based on verbatim
  information it is based on gist and is,
  therefore, resistant to forgetting.

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How Long Do Memories Last

• With delays of one month or less, children of all
  ages remember about the same proportion of
  accurate and inaccurate information as they did
  originally.
• After 6 month delays, 6 year-olds recall is less
  accurate than that of adults.

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How Long Do Memories Last

• According to fuzzy trace, there is a greater rate
  of decay of verbatim (exact) memories relative to
  gist (false) memories.

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Factors Influencing Childrens Eyewitness Memory

• Factors include IQ, incentives to be accurate,
  intermediate levels of stress, and emotionally
  supportive mothers.
• The Role of Knowledge
• Children who know more about medical procedures
  remember more about the procedure.
• Ornstein et al. (1998) tested 4- and 6-year-old
  childrens recall of a mock physical exam.

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Factors Influencing Childrens Eyewitness Memory

• The exam included typical and atypical features.
• Children were interviewed about the exam after a
  12 week delay.
• They were asked open-ended questions followed by
  increasingly specific questions.
• Also asked specific questions about things that
  did not happen.

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Factors Influencing Childrens Eyewitness Memory

• Typical features are more likely to be recalled
  correctly than atypical features.
• The children likely had a script for the exam.
• Children were more likely to correctly reject
  nonevents for the atypical features.
• Children were more likely to say false events
  occurred when they were typical as opposed to
  atypical.

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Factors Influencing Childrens Eyewitness Memory

• Characteristics of the Interview
• Children recall little in response to open-ended
  free recall questions, but it is accurate.
• They recall more with cues, but are more
  inaccurate.
• What about anatomically correct dolls.
• Bruck et al. (1995) interviewed 3-year-olds
  following a medical exam.

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Factors Influencing Childrens Eyewitness Memory

• Half received a genital exam whereas the other
  half did not.
• Using the doll they were asked whether the doctor
  touched their genitals.
• Half of the group that received the exam said
  yes.
• Half of the group that did not receive the exam
  said yes.
• 50 of the children who did not receive the exam
  pointed to the anal or genital region.