An experiment with 72 three-year-olds investigated whether encoding events while seeing iconic gestures boosts children's memory representation of these events. The events, shown in videos of actors moving in an unusual manner, were presented with either iconic gestures depicting how the actors performed these actions, interactive gestures, or no…

The concept of spreading activation describes how retrieval of one memory cues retrieval of other memories that are associated with it. This study explored spreading activation in 6-, 12-, and 18-month-old infants. Infants (n = 144) learned two tasks within the same experimental session; one task, deferred imitation (DI), is typically remembered…

The neurodevelopmental sequelae of early deprivation were examined by testing (N = 132) 8- and 9-year-old children who had endured prolonged versus brief institutionalized rearing or rearing in the natal family. Behavioral tasks included measures that permit inferences about underlying neural circuitry. Children raised in institutionalized…

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were…

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate six-month-old infants' recognition memory for the shape of an object following unimodal (visual) and bimodal (visual and haptic) familiarization. Visual recognition memory was evident only when the conditions of familiarization and testing were identical. Two possible explanations are presented and…

Results as a whole did not support the hypothesis that poor readers show deficits in selective attention relative to age-matched normal readers. (RH)

Two experiments with 18-week-old infants employed an interference paradigm to study infant visual memory for faces. (Author/JMB)

Forgetting, as defined by Piaget as Stage IV error, was studied in infants. Results partially support Piaget's hypothesis. (ST)

In three studies, 12-month-old infants were familiarized either tactually or visually with objects and were then tested for visual recognition memory using either (1) the familiar and a novel object, (2) colored pictures of the objects, or (3) outline drawings of the objects. (Author/MP)

The role of memory factors in the vowel discrimination of normal and at-risk 8-week-old infants was examined by studying the categorical versus continuous discrimination of very brief vowels in a nonnutritive sucking paradigm. Discrimination of the silent delay interval between the last familiar and the first novel stimulus was also examined.…

Investigates the effect of the relationship between conditions at encoding (familiarization) and retrieval (test) with regard to infants' performance on a paired-comparison recognition test. Subjects were 32 male and 32 female infants between 8.7 and 10.3 months of age. (MP)

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which verbal processes influence recognition memory for visual scenes in preschool children. Children were shown line drawings of 12 pairs of items and were asked to describe them. One week later, a recognition test was given in which ability to remember elaborated and unelaborated pictures…

The dependence of immediate, short-term and long-term reproductive memory on operative understanding was studied in elementary school students. Results are interpreted in terms of Piaget's theory. (ST)