The Effect of Delayed Feedback on Infant Learning Reexamined

Abstract

The study reexamines the effect of delayed reinforcement upon contingency behavior in 6- to 8-month-old infants and attempts to account for the temporal discrepancy between span of integration and contingency memory. A modified delayed-reinforcement scheduling procedure enabled a previous methodological criticism to be discounted. The findings confirmed that whereas infants revealed reliable acquisition under immediate reinforcement, a 3-sec delay (whether reset or nonreset) precluded response acquisition, as did 6-sec and 10-sec delay of reinforcement. The findings are interpreted in terms of an informational-load hypothesis which relates short-term memory to the integration and/or segregation of multimodal input.