State‐Dependent Memory in Infants

Abstract

Why do infants remember some things and not others? Human infants frequently cycle through different states such as calm attentiveness, wakeful activity, and crying. Given that cognitive processes do not occur in isolation, such fluctuations in internal state might influence memory processing. In the present experiment, declarative memory in 9-month-old infants (N = 96) was heavily state dependent. Infants exhibited excellent retention of a deferred imitation task after a 15-min delay if their state at encoding was identical to their state at retrieval (e.g., calm). Infants failed to exhibit retention if their state at encoding was different from their state at retrieval (e.g., calm vs. animated). Infant memory processing depends on internal cues. For feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, we thank R. Barr and N. Zmyj. We thank all the infants and parents who participated in this research. We also thank Harlene Hayne for providing the puppet stimuli. Ethics approval: This research was approved by the Faculty of Psychology ethics review board at the Ruhr University Bochum. Informed parental consent was obtained before participation. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.