Most tasks test memory within the same day, however, most forgetting occurs after 24 h. Further, testing memory for simple words or objects does not mimic real-world memory experiences. We designed a memory task showing participants video clips of everyday kinds of experiences, including positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, and tested memory…

Hippocampal-dependent episodic memory and stimulus discrimination abilities are both compromised in the elderly. The reduced capacity to discriminate between similar stimuli likely contributes to multiple aspects of age-related cognitive impairment; however, the association of these behaviors within individuals has never been examined in an animal…

Explored new-born babys' capacity for forming visual memories. Used an habituation procedure that accommodated individual differences by allowing each infant to control the time course of habituation trials. Found significant novelty preference, providing strong evidence that recognition memory can be reliably demonstrated from birth. (Author/JAC)

Two studies investigated the effect of age on memory for visual and spatial information. Five to 10 year olds were asked to reconstruct a previously seen spatial arrangement of objects. The association between an object's identity and its location was weaker for younger than for older children. (LB)

Evaluates preschoolers' ability to distinguish left-right mirror-images of objects on a memory task and ability to name rows of objects on a page in a consistent lateral direction. Abilities were assessed first without specific instructions on the relevance of left-right information and then with instructions. (Author/AS)

Some infants, soon after birth, are capable of storing visual information as reflected in their ability to detect and respond to change in the immediate environment. (Author)

Auditory and visual recognition were studied in subjects ranging in age from 10 to 60 years. In comparison with perceptual and response factors, memory scanning time is relatively insensitive to age differences, and auditory recognition involves the use of a pre-linguistic memory system insensitive to age differences. (Author/MF)

Children (ages 6 to 16) judged which of two photographs of unfamiliar faces showed the same person as an inspection photograph. Recognition accuracy improved markedly between ages 6 and 10 with little change thereafter. (MS)

This study tested the hypothesis that memory for pictorial material is dependent on initial comprehension of the depicted relationships. A total of 72 second, sixth and ninth graders were compared on ability to remember cartoon pictures which did or did not contain action lines as clues to the interaction between actors. (MS)

A study of 300 children in kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 6 found that background music improved visual discrimination task performance at the youngest and middle ages and had no effect on the oldest participants. On a square identification task, background music had no influence on easy and difficult tasks but lowered performance on…

Explores the effect of continuous training on tonal and auditory memory. Does so by comparing the auditory short-term memory skills of English and American children, ages five, six, and seven. (RKM)

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

Research on adult memory for nonverbal representations has found a significant age-related decrement in performance. To investigate age differences in adult locational versus featural information in visual memory, 90 adult women (29 young women with a mean age of 21; 30 middle aged women with a mean age of 43; and 31 older women with a mean age of…