PSYC 3610 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Autobiographical Memory, Semantic Memory, Episodic Memory
20 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
CHAPTER 11 MEMORY IN CHILDHOOD
Introduction
• Early childhood is a time of a rapid growth, although some systems grow
more quickly than others.
• The differential growth of different systems, such as episodic and semantic
memory, is one way we know that the systems are different.
o By the end of the first year or life, infants are rapidly adding words to
their memory for language (lexical memory).
o However, there is little to no representation of autobiographical events
at this point.
• Procedural learning is the acquisition of complex motor tasks.
o All infants learn to walk during the first 18 months.
o This takes practice and learning, and that learning involves memory.
Memory in Infancy
• Human infants are born in a precocious state.
o Completely dependent on caregivers and have little motor control.
• Human infants cannot make any verbal responses until they are about one
year old.
• Limited behaviours that psychologists can observe.
Visual Recognition
• Visual recognition: infants look selectively at novel stimuli over familiar
stimuli
• This allows researchers to observe behaviour in young infants.
• Use gaze direction as a proxy for memory
o E.g., 1) Present a mobile in the crib; 2) the infant may direct his/her
gaze toward it; 3) the novelty wears off and the infant’s attention is
2
directed somewhere else; 4) the mobile is removed from the infant’s
view; 5) later, the mobile is placed again in the crib.
o If the infant now does not attend to it or spends less time attending to
it, this may be evidence of memory.
o If the novelty preference for old objects persists, then a memory may
not have formed.
• Thus, infants show a novelty preference – they refer to look at new things.
• Continuing novelty preference for old objects indicates that something is
interfering with learning.
• De Barbero et al. (2016) found that in most infants watching videos of other
infants crying, their heart rate increased, suggesting stress.
o Relative to infants watching less-stressful stimuli, they showed a
longer novelty preference to stimuli, indicating that their learning was
slower.
o Thus, stress can interfere with learning.
Auditory Recognition
• Newborns are also equipped with a functioning auditory system.
• Newborns can already discriminate their mother’s voice from that of other
women.
• In contrast to the visual recognition studies, infants will look more toward the
source of the mother’s voice than to that of a control woman.
o The infants show a familiarity preference rather than a novelty
preference.
• Even before birth, fetuses one to two weeks before birth recognized their
mother’s voice.
o Heart rate monitoring show an increased heart rate when a tape
recording of the mother’s voice reading a story was played, as
compared to another woman’s voice.
3
Non-nutritive sucking
• Non-nutritive sucking: infants suck a pacifier differentially in the presence of
a novel stimulus compared to a familiar stimulus
• This is a natural reflexive behaviour that is biologically necessary for obtaining
milk.
• Their rate of sucking may increase or decrease depending on what they see
or hear in the environment around them.
• A novel stimulus will usually elicit an increase in sucking, most likely because
the stimulus is new and exciting.
• Familiar stimuli will either not affect the rate of sucking or decrease it.
Conjugate Reinforcement Technique
• Conjugate reinforcement technique: a ribbon is attached to the infant’s foot
and eventually will be attached to a mobile placed overhead
o Kicking behaviour is observed to measure learning and memory.
• Useful to study memory in infants approximately age two months to about six
months
1. A ribbon is attached to the infant’s foot which is not attached to a mobile.
o A baseline measure of kicking is made – how often does the infant
make kicking movements?
2. The ribbon is then attached to the mobile.
o Whenever the infant moves or kicks, it will make the mobile move and
jiggle, which is exciting for the infant.
3. Within a few minutes, most infants will be shaking their feet and kicking
repeatedly to get the mobile to move.
4. The researchers measure how long it takes for the infant to learn that
moving the foot results in the reinforcing display of the moving mobile.
5. During a retention interval, the infant does not have access to the ribbon or
the attached mobile.
o Allows the possibility that the learned response may be forgotten
Document Summary
Auditory recognition: newborns are also equipped with a functioning auditory system, newborns can already discriminate their mother"s voice from that of other women. Imitation: to be able to duplicate the motor patterns of another, one must be able to perceive those patterns, remember those patterns, and then translate them into self-governed actions. Imitation is more similar to recall than to recognition: most infants can duplicate simple actions by an adult experimenter by age of. Infants are also learning the symbolic meanings of words by the end of the first year. Episodic memory: performance in the conjugate reinforcement tasks suggests that infants can learn based on a single event and maintain that knowledge across a long- term memory retention interval. Memory strategies view: memory strategies include reminding oneself of things that need to be remembered, rehearsing unlearned information, allocating cognitive resources, and using retrieval strategies, memory strategies develop as early as around two years of age.
