This study examines the relationship between various basic mental processing abilities in infancy. Two groups of 7-month-olds received the same delayed-response task to assess visuo-spatial working memory, but two different habituation-dishabituation tasks to assess processing speed and recognition memory. The single-stimulus group ("N"…

Newborn infants preferentially orient to familiar over unfamiliar speech sounds. They are also better at remembering unfamiliar speech sounds for short periods of time if learning and retention occur after a feed than before. It is unknown whether short-term memory for speech is enhanced when the sound is familiar (versus unfamiliar) and, if so,…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

We used an optimized configuration of the delayed-response task to explore the ability of young infants to remember which of 2 locations was correct across 12 trials after a 1- to 2-sec delay. Performance improved with age, particularly after 5.5 months. These findings suggest an onset of appreciable working memory for many infants in the middle…