Memory development

Question 1

What 4 things can infants remember?

Answer 1

Voices, objects, early events, and casual events.

Question 2

(voices) What did DeCasper & Fifer (1980) study?

Answer 2

• 12hr-old new borns.
• Provided evidence that babies recognise their mothers’ voices shortly after birth.
• Using a non-nutritive nipple attached to a sensing apparatus, new-borns were found to suck more to hearing a tape of their mother’s voices compared to a tape of a strangers voice.
  (80% new-borns learnt to reverse rule to hear mothers voice.

Question 3

(objects) What did Bushnell, McCutheon, Sinclair, & Tweedie (1984) study?

Answer 3

• Delayed recognition memory in 5-9 week-old infants after extensive familiarisation to a visual stimulus.
• Both age groups were found to demonstrate memory for colour and form information after a 24-hour delay.
• The location of testing, relative to familiarisation, was found to influence the strength of memory.
• No effect of sex or evidence of additively stimulus dimensions.

Question 4

(early events) What did Perris, Myers, & Clifton (1990) retest?

Answer 4

• 2.5 yr olds that had participated at age 6 months.
• Baby reached for Big Bird who made rattle noise, in light and dark.
• Retest: original ppts + new controls asked to choose toy and sound from a set, playing games to reach for noisy puppet in dark.
• 5 uninstructed/5 instructed trials.
  Results: no explicit recall, did not choose Big Bird or rattle, but were more likely to reach for Big Bird on uninstructed trails and were more accurate.
• 9/16 were asked to leave before the end.

Question 5

(casual events) What can happen at 3 months? What did Mader argue?

Answer 5

• Retain casual events for up to a month.
• Non-casual events are easily forgotten.
• Mader argued retaining causal relations is important for organising (making it meaningful and remembering).

Question 6

What is the continuity hypothesis in memory?

Answer 6

• Where there is continuity between early memory abilities and later performance.
• If early memory is good, then you might have better cognitive abilities later.
• A measure at 7 months predicts verbal ability at age 3.5.

Question 7

Freund (1938): Why are memories forgotten?

Answer 7

Repression of traumatic events.
:( what about pleasant memories?
(if there is no knowledge structure, memories are fragmented).

Question 8

What did Howe & Courage (1993) state?

Answer 8

• Early coding and physical sensations are not verbal, therefore are inaccessible.
• Memories may also stay intact, but inaccessible.

Question 9

What is the concept of development of knowledge structures?

Answer 9

• Children must learn the framework for recounting and storing temporal and casual sequences of events.
  (developing other cognitive representations, not just memory, as well as developing symbolic understandings).
• Although infants clearly show evidence of remembering, memories are different to those in which we consciously recall in the past.
• Infantile amnesia applies to explicit memory.

Question 10

What is recognition memory?

Answer 10

Ability to recognise something familiar, in contrast to recall, which is retrieval of conscious memory experienced in the past.
(many demonstrations of infant memory are based on recognition rather than recall).

Question 11

What is recognition recall?

Answer 11

Measured in young children in a similar way by showing them pictures and asking them which ones are familiar.

Question 12

What is implicit memory?

Answer 12

• Acquired and use unconsciously and can affect thoughts and behaviours.
• Most common form is procedural memory, allowing people to perform certain tasks without conscious awareness of previous experiences.

Question 13

What are the drawbacks to implicit memory?

Answer 13

:( - measures are not sensitive enough to measure change e.g., relative vs absolute measures.
:( - changes in methodology throw up developmental change.
:( - brain injured children perform worse than control if brain injury occurred before age 6, suggesting implicit memory is still developing.

Question 14

What is episodic memory?

Answer 14

• Memory for events.
• Involves explicit recall of experience in adults, being organised around ‘scripts’, with abstract knowledge structure to organise temporal and causal sequences of events.

Question 15

(episodic memory) What did Tulving (1972) state?

Answer 15

To remember personally experienced events requires self-awareness and identity in time.

Question 16

What are the drawbacks to episodic memory (Tulving’s study)?

Answer 16

:( - rely too much on cues and not self-report.
:( - evidence that more personal events can be recalled (Fivush & Hammon 1990), but without re-instatement are lost, therefore events are not true as episodic memory can not properly be connect to self.

Question 17

The working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch)

Answer 17

• For short-term recall to maintain/process information temporarily.
• Measured by memory span tests (how many items can you recall in correct order) 7+/- 2
  — central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer.

Question 18

How does the working memory develop?

Answer 18

• Tested by looking at how easy children can retain information that creates overload for each of the two stores (visual confusing stimuli, and stimuli with long names)

Question 19

What did Hulme et al (1984) state?

Answer 19

Speech rate affects capacity of phonological loop, the more you say in 1-2 seconds, the more you can retain.

Question 20

What is cognitive development?

Answer 20

• A strong relationship between cognitive and memory development (probably reciprocal).
• Knowledge based, with it not being about the capacity but more about domain knowledge (the more you know, the more you can remember, supporting idea that knowledge development supports memory development)