The Effect of Crying on Long-Term Memory in Infancy

Abstract

The influence of crying on infants' long-term memory for a learned response was investigated in 3 experiments. In each, infants were trained to move a crib mobile containing 10 identical objects by means of kicking and were then exposed to a reinforcer containing only 2 of these components. This shift in component numerosity produced crying in 53% of the infants. Infants who cried in response to the reward shift evidenced no retention of the contingency 1 week later (Experiment 1) but did have excellent retention at 1 day (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, a brief reactivation treatment alleviated forgetting at 3 weeks regardless of the presence of crying in response to the change in mobiles. An unexpected recency effect characterized the efficacy of the reactivation treatment. The results indicate that crying in response to the violation of a reward-expectation habit functions as an amnesic agent to produce accelerated forgetting.

Amount of training and retention by infants

“…Nine minutes was selected as the constant training duration because infants in this age range typically achieve the learning criterion (1.5 times operant level in 2 of any 3 successive minutes of a reinforcement period) no later than the third 3-min block of session 1 (Butler, 1986;Greco et al, 1986), and most do so earlier (Fagen et al, 1985;Rovee & Rovee, 1969). The infant's operant level of kicking the foot with the ribbon attached was recorded during the initial 3-min nonreinforcement period in session 1 (the baseline phase).…”

“…Training was discontinued for an additional 15% of the infants originally tested who cried in excess of 120 consecutive seconds in any session. This rate of attrition is characteristic of this procedure, particularly when multiple sessions increase the opportunity for subject loss (Fagen et al, 1985).…”

Implications of Timing of Maternal Depressive Symptoms for Early Cognitive and Language Development

“…Negative maternal affect seems to diminish infants' motivation and interest in communicating and increase infants' distress and arousal (Field, 1995;Gauvain, 2001). Moreover, frequent bouts of infant distress seem to interfere with infants' ability to process information (Bugental, Blue, Cortez, Fleck, & Rodriguez, 1992;Hay, 1997) and increase infants likelihood of forgetting recent information (Fagen, Ohr, Fleckenstein, & Ribner, 1985;Hay, 1997;Singer & Fagen, 1992). Thus, infants of chronically depressed mothers may be more vulnerable to learning difficulties in part because the high levels of negative maternal affect increases infants' arousal to levels that interfere with infants' early learning efforts.…”

Emotional regulation and emotional development

“…Contrary to traditional formulations that emphasized how the irrational and stressful features of emotional arousal make it difficult to maintain competent functioning, these newer views emphasize how emotions organize social communication and interaction, personality processes, goal-achievement, and cognitive processing from an early age. Informed by bioevolutionary models of emotion in human adaptation, neofunctionalist views note that while emotional arousal retains its capacity to undermine healthy functioning, it also motivates and guides, even in children, adaptive behavioral processes as diverse as empathy (e.g., Hoffman, 1982), memory retrieval (Fagan, Ohr, Fleckenstein, and Ribner, 1985), parent-infant interaction (Gianino and Tronick, 1988), attachment (Thompson, Connell, and Bridges, 1988), and self-and otherunderstanding (Bretherton, McNew, and Beeghly-Smith, 1981). Emotion can thus be a "behavior regulator" (cf.…”