Seven-month-old infants chunk items in memory. 2012

Mariko Moher, and Arin S Tuerk, and Lisa Feigenson
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. mmoher@wjh.harvard.edu

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose working memory capacity is still maturing, also can chunk items in memory. In Experiment 1, we found that in the absence of chunking cues, infants failed to remember three identical hidden objects. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that infants successfully remembered three hidden objects when provided with overlapping spatial and featural chunking cues. In Experiment 4, we found that infants did not chunk when provided with either spatial or featural chunking cues alone. Finally, in Experiment 5, we found that infants also failed to chunk when spatial and featural cues specified different chunks (i.e., were pitted against each other). Taken together, these results suggest that chunking is available before working memory capacity has matured but still may undergo important development over the first year of life.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007223 Infant A child between 1 and 23 months of age. Infants
D008297 Male Males
D008570 Memory, Short-Term Remembrance of information for a few seconds to hours. Immediate Recall,Memory, Immediate,Working Memory,Memory, Shortterm,Immediate Memories,Immediate Memory,Immediate Recalls,Memories, Immediate,Memories, Short-Term,Memories, Shortterm,Memory, Short Term,Recall, Immediate,Recalls, Immediate,Short-Term Memories,Short-Term Memory,Shortterm Memories,Shortterm Memory,Working Memories
D011939 Mental Recall The process whereby a representation of past experience is elicited. Recall, Mental
D002666 Psychology, Child Branch of psychology involving the study of normal and abnormal behavior of children. Child Psychology,Infant Psychology,Pediatric Psychology,Psychology, Infant,Psychology, Pediatric
D003463 Cues Signals for an action; that specific portion of a perceptual field or pattern of stimuli to which a subject has learned to respond. Cue
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man

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