Chapter 14 Flashcards
What age are you earliest memories in different stages of life? What are the implications?
Earliest memories of children between 5-9–> from 1½ years, Adolescents from 2½ years, Adults from just over 3 years
1) Boundaries of childhood amnesia are more flexible than assumed.
2) One reason why most adults cannot recall any memories from the first 3 years of life is b/c they forgot
Why is infantile amnesia hard to study and how can we remedy this?
It is not easy to assess the accuracy of adults’ claimed memories of early childhood –> must focus on significant events that can be precisely dated + verified by a third party.
In a study, children who had been under 3 years old when their sibling was born remembered virtually nothing, but those older than 3 at the time had strong memories for the event.
Another issue is deciding whether adults’ reported memories of early childhood are genuine recollections or are based on knowledge obtained from others
In a study, childhood memories that adults believed to be genuine differed from those based on second-hand knowledge.
Genuine ones were more pictorial + less verbal + involved more feelings + more complex.
Therefore, most of their childhood memories that adults regard as true recollections may well actually be genuine
What are the main problems in testing memory in infants?
Limited language ability. Can’t use verbal instructions to tell them what to learn.
Lack of attention
Limited motor skills under 1-year-old
Hard to decide whether their memories involve implicit memory (unconscious recollection) or explicit memory (conscious recollection)
Remedy: memory formation in one trial + long-term memory in the absence of practice immediately after learning + impaired performance on the task by amnesic patients.
Describe the ecological model of Rovee-Collier + Cuevas + contrast it with traditional views:
Traditional view: 1-year-olds can only learn implicitly + have simple memory for perceptual and motor skills acquired through positive reinforcement/reward system
Infants could not form explicit or declarative memories until toward the end of the first year when the hippocampus starts maturing at 8 months (maturational hypothesis).
Therefore, all forms of learning + memory will improve with increasing age.
Ecological view: basic memory processes do not change with increasing age. It is learning that’s different between infants + children b/c infants cannot move independently so they associate whatever they see together in a nonselective fashion.
But when they start crawling at 9 months, they encounter more objects + more selective in forming associations.
Therefore, younger infants surpass older infants when learning/remembering associations when two stimuli are presented together
Describe the mobile conjugate reinforcement task
Must use situations that interest and motivates infants otherwise we underestimate how much they can learn/remember.
Suspending a mobile over the baby’s crib + attaching it to the baby’s foot via a ribbon
Baseline phase–> the ribbon attached to the infant’s foot is also attached to the side of the crib but not the mobile.
Learning phase–> the ribbon attached to the infant’s foot is also attached to the mobile. The infant learns that kicking (a response) causes the mobile to move (the reward or reinforcement).
Test phase–>the ribbon is once again attached to the side of the crib but not to the mobile.
Result: Memory is shown when the infant’s rate of kicking is greater than in the baseline phase.
Strength of memory depends on variations in the length of time between the learning and test phases
The level of kicking responses of 2-month-olds dropped to the baseline level when there was a gap of 2 days between learning and test–>indicates short-term remembering while the 3-month-olds still showed a reliable effect of learning after a week.
Reminder condition–>Consisted of a moving mobile (controlled by the experimenter) presented to the infants sometime before being tested.
Memory returned to its initial level even when testing took place after a delay of 2 weeks + reactivated a significant amount of kicking at a delay of 1 month.
Therefore, even very young infants can show good long-term memory.
Limitation: only suitable for use with infants up to the age of about 7 months.
What is one way to remedy the limitation of the mobile study?
The train task is suitable for older infants.
Infants learn to press a lever to make a miniature train move around a track.
Infants aged 6 months learned this task + then received five reminders (2-minute additional reinforcement sessions) at 7, 8, 9, 12, and 18 months of age.
Retention of stuff learned at 6 months was tested when they were 24 months old.
Results: Significant evidence of long-term memory 18 months after learning even with only 1 reminder
Why? The reminder triggers retrieval of the original memory + the two memories are then integrated.
This integration process can occur only when the reminder is presented before the original memory has been forgotten.
Time window–>Time period after the original memory is formed during which reminders enhance infants’ long-term memory. Therefore, the reminder fails to enhance long-term memory when presented outside the time window.
Overall, very young infants can have longer-lasting memories than predicted with the traditional approach.
Define deferred imitation tasks
It is an explicit memory task where infants observe target actions, with LT memory shown when infants reproduce some of these actions after a delay.
Traditional approach: via deferred imitation, infants under 9 months show little or no deferred imitation. Research findings are more consistent with ecological theory.
Target actions shown to 6-month-olds for a 2nd time after the initial presentation the day before–>evidence of deferred imitation over a 10-day period.
With the opportunity to engage in repeated retrieval of the actions–> deferred imitation was found 10 weeks after learning.
6-month-olds only show deferred imitation when the testing environment is identical to the one in which learning occurred.
the learning of older infants is s more extensive–>continued to show deferred imitation even when the testing environment was not identical to the learning one.
Experimenters presented target actions to 3-month-olds + then provided them with periodic reminders over the next 3 months. When tested at the age of 6 months, they showed evidence of deferred imitation.
Results: deferred imitation has been found in infants as young as 3 months at the time of learning. 6-month-olds can retain memory of target actions over periods of several weeks.
Describe sensory preconditioning in infants of 6 and 9 months
Sensory preconditioning: An association between two stimuli that is established prior to the start of conditioning.
Phase 1–>infant formed an association between a pink rabbit + a yellow duck
-Exposed to the two animals together for 60 minutes + for two 30-minute sessions with the two animals on a single day in another experiment.
Phase 2–>the infant saw three target actions modelled on the rabbit.
Phase 3–>tested with the duck to see whether they could imitate the actions previously modelled on the rabbit
Assumption: the ability to do phase 3 indicated memory for the initial association between the rabbit and the duck in Phase 1–>evidence for sensory preconditioning.
Results: Longer association retention when the animals were presented for two 30-minute sessions. The 6-month-old infants showed longer retention of the association between the two animals (4 weeks) than the 9-month-olds (2 weeks)
Young infants have very good long-term memory for associations between objects that are seen together + remember such associations for longer periods of time than older ones.
Why? Memories are strengthened simply by retrieving them. Thus, results are due to retrieval of what had been learned in the first 30-minute session.
Implications: forming associations between adjacent objects is of particular importance to infants before they reach the stage of independent locomotion.
Why does declarative memory in children become progressively better?
Young children show improvements in declarative memory (conscious recollection) over the first 2 or 3 years of life until adolescence.
Siegler:
1) The capacity of ST/working memory increase over the years.
2) Children develop more memory strategies (e.g. rehearsing) + learn to use these strategies more efficiently.
3) Older children possess much more knowledge
4) Children with good metamemory (knowledge we possess about our own memory) can use their memory systems more effectively
What are the 4 components of WM by Baddley:
Working memory capacity: An assessment of how much info can be processed and stored at the same time.
Central executive (resembling an attentional system) Phonological loop (used for verbal rehearsal) Visuospatial sketchpad (stores visual + spatial information briefly) Episodic buffer (integrates information from the other components)
Does the structure of the WM remain constant as a function of age?
The same three components of WM also present in children throughout the age range 5 to 12.
Gathercole et al. studied boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 15 who performed a range of memory tasks relevant to working memory.
Results: progressive annual improvements in all three components which leads to enhanced overall memory + the structure of WM was fairly constant
Cause of these age-related changes in WM involves the frontoparietal network
Limitation: most research in this field is correlational
Can a well-informed child remember some things better than an ill-informed adult?
Chi studied digit recall + reproduction of chess positions in 10-year-olds skilled at chess and adults knowing little about chess.
The adult performed better than the children in digit recall.
Children’s recall of chess positions was over 50% higher than that of the adults
Another study compared children and adults with similar chess expertise.
Both groups remembered chess positions equally well + much better than nonexpert children and adults.
Thus, memory for chess positions depends largely on expertise and very little on age
Describe two studies that prove that memory strategies are used more often in adults than children
In one study, participants are presented with a certain number of words belonging to various categories (e.g. four-footed animals).
These words are presented in a random order followed by free recall
Results: Most adults rehearse and recall the words category by category (organizational approach)
In a longitudinal study on children between the ages of 8 and 17.
Children were presented with four pictures belonging to each of six categories (e.g. animals, food), could arrange them however they liked then recall as many pics as possible
Results:
1) Free recall increased steadily with age, being 50% higher when the children were 17 than when they were 8.
2) At the older ages, there was more sorting of the pictures into their categories
3) Children with high working memory capacity used categorical organization more successfully than those with low capacity.
Why is there only a moderate tendency for children with good metamemory knowledge to have superior memory performance to children with poor metamemory
Children may not always be motivated/able to use effective memory strategies they possess.
Younger children aged 7-8 (but not the older ones aged 9-10) made random choices when asked to select definition-word pairs they would like to restudy b/c they are unable to make effective use of metamemory info
What is the distinction between declarative metamemory and procedural metamemory.
Declarative metamemory–> conscious knowledge about factors influencing memory performance (what factors influence memory and why)
Procedural metamemory–>The application of metamemory during memory performance (monitoring, controlling, and regulating memory activity)
Declarative metamemory increases steadily between the ages of 6 and 10.
Procedural metamemory improves between the ages of 6 and 10 but changes relatively little between the ages of 8 and 10.
Summerize the reasons why older children generally remember much more than younger ones.
The main components of the WM system all increase in capacity during childhood;
children’s knowledge increases + their use of effective strategies increases + greater awareness of their own memory system (metamemory) but fail to use the metamemory information they possess.
Organizational strategies are increasingly used by children as they grow older due to the development of working memory capacity over time
Children possessing the most relevant content knowledge on a learning task, are likely to have acquired it by having high working memory capacity + using effective learning strategies.
Describe verbatim and gist memory
Brainerd and Reyna–>Argued that there are two kinds of memory trace.
Verbatim traces–>Reflect the learner’s “actual” experiences. Accurate + detailed info about material
Gist memory traces–>Contain the learner’s “understanding” of experiences. Semantic info about material (e.g. “France” produces wine /cheese).
Children aged 11 showed much better recognition memory for nonwords (e.g. cexib, zuteg ) than those aged 5.
