Infant learning and long-term memory at 6 months: A confirming analysis

Rational action selection in 1½- to 3-year-olds following an extended training experience

“…Therefore, no firm conclusions can be drawn about the intentional status of these actions. Moreover, consistent with an interpretation of a relative predominance of habitual control early in life, infants' early instrumental actions appear to be strongly stimulus and context dependent (Borovsky & Rovee-Collier, 1990;Butler & Rovee-Collier, 1989;Galluccio & Rovee-Collier, 1999;Greco, Hayne, & Rovee-Collier, 1990;Hartshorn & Rovee-Collier, 1997;Rovee-Collier & Hayne, 1987;Rovee-Collier, Patterson, & Hayne, 1985) and are relatively inflexible.…”

Bidirectional priming in infants

“…In contrast, forgetting and reactivation control groups exhibited no evidence of retention whatsoever. An identical result was obtained with 6-month-olds in the same task (Hill, Borovsky, & Rovee-Collier, 1988), with 6-to 18-month-olds in a task in which lever-pressing moved a miniature train around a circular track (Hartshorn & Rovee-Collier, 1997;Hildreth & Rovee-Collier, 1999Sweeney & Rovee-Collier, 2000), and with 14-to 18-month-olds engaged in multiple activities in a laboratory setting (Sheffield & Hudson, 1994).…”

“…Recently, Barr, Vieira, and Rovee-Collier (2001) reported that 6-month-olds' retention of an imitation task was protracted from 1 day (Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996) to 2 weeks when it was associated with an operant task that infants typically remember for 2 weeks (Hartshorn & Rovee-Collier, 1997). The original association between the two tasks was formed when infants watched an adult model a series of target actions on a hand puppet (the imitation task) in the incidental context of a miniature train that the infants had learned they could move by leverpressing (the operant task).…”

Effects of priming duration on retention over the first 1½ years of life

“…The duration of the original memory of infants trained between 3 and 18 months of age is from that is sufficient to recover the forgotten memory 24 hr later decreases logarithmically over the infancy period, from 2 min for infants trained at 3 months to 1.5 s for infants trained at 18 months (Experiment 1). Even at its briefest, however, the prime had to last longer than is required for an individual to merely glance at a stimulus, which takes 1 s (Hartshorn & Rovee-Collier, 1997;Volosin & Rovee, 1976) to be effective. In retrospect, this constraint ensures that in the course of everyday life, each sweep of the gaze across the busy landscape will not automatically trigger a flood of latent memories; rather, a forgotten memory will be reactivated only if the infant's gaze alights and briefly rests on a potential retrieval cue.…”