PubMed · 7087764
The source did not provide an abstract. Follow the original record for more information.
Explore connections, maps & timelines
M Lansman, E Hunt. 1982. Individual differences in secondary task performance.. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03197621
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
KEEP EXPLORING
In three experiments with 78 infants, we explored the effect of introducing novel information about a central target after a short delay on 6-month-olds' recognition of the original target, the novel exposure target, and a completely novel one. In all experiments, infants learned to move a particular crib mobile (the central target) by kicking and then were exposed to a novel mobile (the conflicting postevent information) immediately after training was over. In Experiment 1, memory for the original mobile was unimpaired, but infants treated both the exposure mobile and a completely novel one as if they had actually been present originally. In Experiment 2, only a completely novel mobile was an effective remainder in a reactivation paradigm, indicating that the impact of postevent information was relatively long-lasting and that the failure of the other mobiles to recover the training memory resulted from trace competition at the time of retrieval. In Experiment 3, identical novel information did not proactively affect recognition. Thus, 6-month-olds' memory of a central target is resistant to impairment by conflicting postevent information after a short delay, but they are highly prone to source misattribution. We propose that postevent information effects are cognitively efficient.
The capacity of 6-month-old infants to maintain information in working memory for several seconds was studied using two versions of an oculomotor delayed response task. Infants were presented with either a cue stimulus in a target location (Experiment 1), or an abstract, central stimulus (Experiment 2) which could be used to predict the peripheral location in which an attractive target stimulus subsequently appeared. Eye movements during delay periods from 600 to 5000 ms were recorded. The results indicated that infants maintained information about stimulus locations in working memory for 3-5 s. These results imply maturity of regions of the prefrontal cortex closely associated with a similar task used in neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies.
The first experiment shows that 11-month-olds can encode novel causal events from a brief period of observational learning, and recall much of the information after 24 h. The second experiment, using both a longitudinal and a cross-sectional design, shows recall of the same events after a delay of 3 months. The infants remembered more individual actions than whole sequences, but reproduced many of the events in their entirety (and always in correct order) after the long delay. Although they also reproduced arbitrarily ordered events immediately after being shown them at 11 months, they began to forget them after 24 h and showed essentially no recall for this type of event after 3 months. The experiments not only indicate long-lasting memory for briefly experienced events in infancy, they also suggest that the factors that organize recall at this young age are similar to those found in older children and adults.