Event Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood
As adults, we take memory for granted. It is only when our memories fail us (where did we park the car?) that we notice memory. In fact, memory seems so easy that we forget that for infants and young children, major improvements in memory take place every day. One of our major lines of research in the Memory at Emory lab involves exploration of developmental changes in memory for past events. Because we cannot ask infants and young children to tell us what they remember, we rely on a nonverbal imitation-based method that allows them to show us.
"Make a shaker" |
Put in the ball. |
Cover it up. |
Shake it! |
Elicited or deferred imitation is a method in which a researcher uses specifically designed props to demonstrate a sequence of actions. For example, we might use two nesting cups and a block to “make a rattle" (see images above). Either immediately (elicited imitation), after a delay (deferred imitation), or both, we give the infant or child a chance to use the props to imitate the sequence. By tracking how much of the sequence the children reproduce immediately, after a few minutes or hours, and after a longer delay (weeks to months), we gain insight into how children form memories and how well they retain them.
Using this task we have learned that by late in the first year of life, infants are already creating enduring memories. Over the second year of life and beyond, their memory abilities grow more robust and reliable. One of the major goals of our laboratory is to understand the causes of these developmental changes. We are actively pursuing this agenda by using eye tracking to examine changes in where and for how long infants and children focus their attention while they are learning something new. We are also using event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine changes in the neural processes that turn attention into memory.