Associative binding in early childhood: Evidence from a preferential looking paradigm

Abstract

Relational memory processes are responsible for forming representations that bind together the co‐occurring elements of an experience. These processes provide a foundation of episodic memory, the capacity to remember specific events about one's past. In the present research, we used a visual comparison paradigm to determine whether toddlers can form memories for the relation between co‐occurring items. In Experiment 1, 66 2‐year‐olds viewed pairs of cartoon faces (AB; CD) and did not show a significant novelty preference for the violated associations (i.e., did not look longer at AD rearranged pair than old AB pair when exposed to AD‐AB). However, toddlers looked longest at the individual face (i.e., D) violating a studied pair, which appeared to be supported by visual preference for centrally located stimuli. In Experiment 2, 46 2‐year‐olds participated in a similar procedure, but faces violating the pair during test were located to the periphery (e.g., AB‐AC). Under these conditions, toddlers looked longer at recombined pair AC. Overall, our results show that toddlers show some ability to make item‐item associations but may need to overcome preferential looking biases to demonstrate this capacity. Furthermore, looking behaviors beyond overall novelty preference may be informative even when overall novelty preference is not found.

Memories of structured input become increasingly distorted across development - Working Paper

“…While transition lure sequences were not seen as frequently as triplets, participants had indeed seen these sequences during exposure; thus, endorsing them as old is correct. In general, the finding that by age five children can remember infrequent, arbitrary associations is consistent with past work showing above-chance episodic memory in this developmental period (Drummey & Newcombe, 2002;Hudson et al, 1992;Johnson et al, 2020;Ngo et al, 2021;Saragosa-Harris et al, 2021). However, other work has emphasized that children's associative memory continues to improve well beyond this period into late childhood (Riggins, 2014) and adolescence (Lee et al, 2016).…”

“…With respect to simple associations, much work has demonstrated the protracted development of associative memory-or, the sorts of memories that connect multiple elements within an experience (Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001)-across childhood (Lloyd et al, 2009;Raj & Bell, 2010;Sluzenski et al, 2006). Memory for associations experienced just a single time may begin to emerge in a basic form as early as 18-24 months of age (Gómez & Edgin, 2016), with above-chance memory for arbitrary associations in standard lab-based tasks being observed regularly among 3-and 4-year old preschoolers (Drummey & Newcombe, 2002;Hudson et al, 1992;Johnson et al, 2020;Naus et al, 1977;Ngo et al, 2021;Saragosa-Harris et al, 2021).…”

Attention to novelty interferes with toddlers' emerging memory decision‐making

“…Additionally, older infants compared to younger infants require less time or exposure in order to encode items (Hayne, 2007; Rose et al, 1982), remember more items for longer periods of time (Herbert & Hayne, 2000; Morgan & Hayne, 2011), and can recognize an item even with a change in context (e.g., Robinson & Pascalis, 2004). Finally, infants also become increasingly better at remembering which items were learned together, in what location, and in what order (Barr et al, 1996; Johnson et al, 2020; Newcombe et al, 2014). Despite the remarkable memory abilities documented in these studies, little is known about how young children make their memory decisions, or utilize their memory signals in order to make a decision.…”

Neuroimaging the sleeping brain: Insight on memory functioning in infants and toddlers

“…Although this paradigm was initially developed to examine the ability to discriminate between an old and new item, more recent instantiations have examined infants' ability to form associations between multiple features of the memory, including assessments of item-context relations with great specificity (reviewed in: Pathman & Ghetti, 2016). As such, this paradigm provides a non-verbal measure that can examine how infants make associations between features of a memory, including between items and: their spatial location (e.g., Richmond, Zhao, & Burns, 2015), temporal order (e.g., Tummeltshammer, Amso, French, & Kirkham, 2017), and other items (e.g., Johnson, Leckey, Davison, & Ghetti, 2019). A particular benefit of the visual paired comparison paradigm is that only a single presentation of stimuli is necessary, which bolsters the case that information retained is represented by episodic mechanisms, and that responses are evidence of reflecting on a single event instead of a learned association or a fact.…”

“…Retention of fully arbitrary associations between actions and their temporal order in a sequence after one single demonstration is not reliable until the end of the second year of life, and it is not until 28 months that this order can be retained over a delay (Bauer, Hertsgaard, Dropik, & Daly, 1998). The timing of this emergence is remarkably similar across tasks and types of relations (Johnson et al, 2019;Newcombe, Balcomb, Ferrara, Hansen, & Koski, 2014;Richmond et al, 2015), but the absence of studies examining these relations with the same paradigm and participants prevents firm conclusions and begs for more work examining memory in the toddler years.…”