Two experiments examined the effects of a change in a reinforcing stimulus's color on memory for an operant response in three- to four-month-old infants. (Author/RH)

Infants who cried in response to a reward shift evidenced no retention of the contingency 1 week later but did have excellent retention at one day. Reactivation treatment alleviated forgetting at three weeks. Results indicate that crying in response to violation of a reward-expectation habit functions as an amnesic agent to produce accelerated…

This study of 20 3-month-old infants with Down's syndrome and 20 nondisabled infants found that both groups were successfully trained to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile by kicking, and displayed long-term retention a week later. Conditioning and retention-test performance of the two groups did not differ. (Author/JDD)

To find predictive relations between measures taken in infancy and later scores on intelligence tests, a study was made that measured in the infant those cognitive processes examined later in life. Operant conditioning tasks were employed which required 3-, 7-, and 11-month-old infants to execute some response to produce an environmental…

Trained 3 month olds to move a 10-object mobile. Changing the mobile to two objects resulted in crying for half the infants. A retention test was given one and seven days later. All infants exhibited retention at one day but only noncriers at seven days. Criers displayed more anger than noncriers in the one-day retention test. (BC)

The influence of negative affect on the retrieval of information from memory during infancy was investigated in two studies through the use of an operant conditioning paradigm. The procedure used, known as "mobile conjugate reinforcement," involves a free operant task in which an infant is reinforced for footkicking by the movement of an…