Visual working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in integrating fragments into meaningful units, but no study has addressed how visual WM integration takes place in children. The current study examined whether WM integration emerges once preschoolers master Gestalt cue and can retain two representations in WM (automatic integration hypothesis), or…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

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…

How does developing attentional control operate within visual short-term memory (VSTM)? Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults (total n = 205) were asked to report whether probe items were part of preceding visual arrays. In Experiment 1, central or peripheral cues oriented attention to the location of to-be-probed items either prior to…

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…

Infants' visual short-term memory (VSTM) for simple objects undergoes dramatic development: Six-month-old infants can store in VSTM information about only a simple object presented in isolation, whereas 8-month-old infants can store information about simple objects presented in multiple-item arrays. This study extended this work to examine…

In this study, 6-month-old infants' visual working memory for a static feature (color) and a dynamic feature (rotational motion) was compared. Comparing infants' use of different features can only be done properly if experimental manipulations to those features are equally salient (Kaldy & Blaser, 2009; Kaldy, Blaser, & Leslie,…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

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…

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

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

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…

In Experiment I, 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Experiment II contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. (RH)

Children's ability to remember and report past mental states was examined. Four-year olds were able to report all past mental states. Three-year olds reported past pretenses, images, and perceptions well; desires and intentions with moderate difficulty; and beliefs with great difficulty. (BC)