Infants' Forgetting of Correlated Attributes and Object Recognition

Abstract

Infants as young as 3 months of age can encode the relations among object features. Because object recognition depends critically upon a match between perceived feature configurations and representations of the object in long-term memory, the present experiments focused on infants' long-term memory for feature correlations. In 3 experiments with 72 3-month-olds, we documented the forgetting functions of different feature correlations, examined their relation to infants' memory for individual features, and replicated the findings with different stimuli. Infants were trained to activate a mobile composed of two kinds of blocks that differed in color, the figures displayed on them, and the figures' colors and were tested after different delays with recombinations of either the block colors, the figures, or the figure colors. Infants remembered some of the original feature combinations for up to 3 days but forgot all of them after 4 days. Even after 4 days, however, infants remembered the individual features that had entered into the original combinations. These results demonstrate that very young infants not only encode the relations among object features but also remember them for several days. Moreover, there is a dissociation in memory between features and feature relations: Feature relations are forgotten sooner than the individual features that comprise those relations.

Visual‐preference and operant measures of infant memory

“…(RRs for the immediate test groups were not calculated because the IRT, which provides the denominator of the RR was replaced by the immediate paired-comparison test.) Because 3-montholds who are tested solely with either the familiar mobile or a novel one after 4 days show no retention decrement (Bhatt & Rovee-Collier, 1996;RoveeCollier & Sullivan, 1980), we again attribute this result to the simultaneous presence of a novel mobile during the paired-comparison test.…”

Infants' long‐term memory for a serial list: Recognition and reactivation

“…This reversion was described by the Jacksonian ®rst in±last out principle (Jackson, 1884, reprinted in Taylor, 1958, which also describes the forgetting of absolute and relational information by 3-month-olds (Bhatt & Rovee-Collier, 1996). Interestingly, 3-montholds' serial-position curve on the delayed recognition test assumed the same form after 1 week, even though they failed to exhibit signi®cant retention of any item.…”

“…Retention was assessed in terms of two individual measures of relative responding that our laboratory has used in all previous studies of infant memory (Rovee-Collier, 1996). The primary measure, the baseline ratio, indicates the extent to which the infant's test performance exceeded operant level.…”

“…School-age children, for example, learn order information after they learn item information rather than simultaneously with it (for review, see Flavell, 1970). Previously, we found that infants forget other kinds of relational information before they forget identity information (Bhatt & Rovee-Collier, 1996)Ðan instantiation of the Jacksonian ®rst-in, last-out principle (Jackson, 1884, reprinted in Taylor, 1958. If the same principle describes the acquisition and forgetting of item and order information, then we would expect to observe a reversion in the kind of information that infants remember after a long delay.…”

Exploiting relationship between attributes for improved face verification

“…Actually, research in the field of cognitive discovery has shown the usefulness of the relationship between feature sets. For example, Bhatt and Rovee-Collier [3] experimentally show that infants as young as 3 months of age gain the capability to encode the relations among object features, and use such feature configuration for general object recognition. However, traditionally one of the major challenges in modeling the feature configurations lies in the huge number of low-level features (e.g., the dimension of a 100 × 100 face image is as high as 10, 000 using the gray-value features).…”