Déjà Vu All Over Again: Effects of Reenactment on Toddlers' Event Memory

Abstract

Four experiments examined (1) whether reenactment improves 18-month-olds' event memory, (2) how effects of reenactment are affected by the time at which the reenactment occurs, (3) whether timing of reenactment affects recall over very long periods of time, and (4) how partial reenactment affects recall. Children were trained to perform 8 novel activities in a laboratory playroom, returned to the playroom 15 min to 8 weeks later to reenact the activities, and were tested for recall of the original activities 6 to 8 weeks after reenactment. Results indicate that reenactment improves toddlers' event memory (Experiment 1); reenactment is more effective after a time delay (Experiment 2); effects of timing of reenactment are even more pronounced after a 6 month delay (Experiment 3); and reenacting half of the activities is just as effective as reenacting all of the activities (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that reenacting events or parts of events can remind very young children of past experiences and inoculate against forgetting over very long periods of time.

Age‐related changes in memory reactivation by 1‐ and 2‐year‐old human infants

“…Although our current understanding of memory reactivation in human infants is based largely on operant conditioning procedures, a growing body of research, including the data reported here, has shown that the phenomenon of memory reactivation can be examined with other memory paradigms commonly used with infants (Bahrick et al, 1997;Barr, Marrott, & RoveeCollier, 2003;Barr, Vieira, & Rovee-Collier, 2002;Cornell, 1979;Hayne, Barr, & Herbert, 2003;Hudson & Sheffield, 1998. Thus, despite the common claim that operant conditioning procedures and VRM procedures measure different kinds of memory in human infants, many of the findings obtained using these two different procedures are remarkably similar (Hayne, 2004).…”

“…First, studies of memory reactivation have focussed primarily on changes that occur over the first year of life; substantially less is known about agerelated changes in memory reactivation that occur during the second half of the infancy period (but see Hsu et al, 2005). Second, although memory reactivation has been documented in other memory paradigms, much of this work has focussed on infants of a single age rather than two or more age groups (e.g., Hudson & Sheffield, 1998. As such, the generality of the developmental principles of memory retrieval derived from studies of operant conditioning procedures is not known.…”

Retrieval difficulty and retention of reactivated memories over the first year of life

“…He defined retrieval difficulty in terms of the time since the last retrieval. This hypothesis has since been confirmed in studies with normal adults (Landauer & Bjork, 1978;Schmidt & Bjork, 1992), amnesic adults (Camp, Foss, O'Hanlon, & Stevens, 1996;Wilson, 1989), school-age children (Rea & Modigliani, 1985), toddlers (Hudson & Sheffield, 1998), and 3-monthold infants (Hartshorn, Wilk, Muller, & Rovee-Collier, 1998b;Rovee-Collier, Evancio, & Earley, 1995;RoveeCollier, Greco-Vigorito, & Hayne, 1993). Although retention of the newly acquired memory is superior when successive retrievals are further apart, only one study has reported data suggesting that the same principle may describe retention of a reactivated memory.…”

Spacing Repetitions Over Long Timescales: A Review and a Reconsolidation Explanation

“…Some of the phenomena explained using the time window concept are categorization, memory modification and the spacing effect (Rovee-Collier, 1995). For the spacing effect, studies using the time window concept have found that repetitions that occur later in the time window lead to a task being remembered longer than repetitions that occur earlier in the time window; however, if the repetition is outside the time window, even if it is only a single day, it is as if the infant is encountering it for the first time (Rovee-Collier et al, 1995; Hartshorn et al, 1998b; Hudson and Sheffield, 1998; Galluccio and Rovee-Collier, 2006). …”