Developmental changes in the specificity of memory over the first year of life

TLDR

The study examined how differences between encoding and retrieval conditions affect retention in 260 infants aged 2–12 months. The authors tested 9‑ and 12‑month‑olds with a different cue or context after delays covering their forgetting functions, and combined these data with previously collected data from 2‑ to 6‑month‑olds in the same task. Specificity constraints on memory retrieval loosen with age, especially at the extremes of the forgetting function; older infants show less sensitivity to cue changes after short delays and to context changes after long delays, indicating a gradual decrease in retrieval cue specificity during the second year. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Abstract

In two experiments with 260 infants between 2 and 12 months of age, we examined how differences between the conditions of encoding and retrieval affect retention. Initially, 9- and 12-month-olds were tested with a different cue (Experiment 1) or in a different context (Experiment 2) after delays spanning their respective forgetting functions. These data were then combined with corresponding data previously collected from 2- to 6-month-olds trained and tested in an equivalent task. The resulting analyses revealed that the specificity constraints on memory retrieval become progressively looser at the extremes of the forgetting function with age. With increasing age, retention was less affected by cue changes after shorter absolute delays and, except at 6 months, by context changes after longer absolute delays. This pattern dovetails with evidence of decreasing specificity in the retrieval cues required for deferred imitation during infants' 2nd year and reveals that the memory abilities of older children evolve gradually from early in infancy. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 33: 61–78, 1998