Infant Memory

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Recommended: Questions about operant conditioning

Infant memory is a fairly new concept that has been discovered as time has progressed. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. Infant memory is a lot more complex than adult memory; early findings have detected that infants are capable of retaining memory for a period of time. These discoveries introduced us to different methods of testing infant memory: operant conditioning, visual paired comparison and deferred imitation. Each of these methods shows evidence of some memory retention in infants, demonstrating that infants do have the ability to retain information within infancy period. To understand this, a thorough explanation of one of the research methods (operant conditioning) demonstrates how these procedures …show more content…

The activity board consists of 3 buttons and 3 frames. If the buttons are pressed, the frames will change color and load pictures of common objects. The infant will begin by sitting in front of the activity board while the board is off. During this process, the spontaneous rate in which the infant presses the buttons is measured to create a baseline. Next the infant sits in front of the activity board. During this procedure, the activity board is turned on and the infant will observe the instructor perform the task. Following this, the infant will perform the task for a period of time. Next, the infant waits 24 hours where he or she is then tested by turning off the board allowing the infant to play with the activity board. If the infant presses the buttons, the infant has retained memory of the task previously learned. In order to test how long they can remember the task, one must wait a few days or weeks and test the infants again on the same task, as studied by Rovee-Collier in …show more content…

She tested the infants through operant conditioning, specifically using the reactivation method which translates to make active again, it acts as the reminder. The infant group of 2- to 6- months of age began by lying down in the crib not attached to the ribbon to see the spontaneous kick rate, in order to set a baseline. The infants then watched the mobile being moved by the experimenter for 3 minutes. After this a 9 minute training took place. The experimenter during this stage measured the kicks per minute by attaching the ribbon to both the infant and the mobile. Next 24 hours later, the experimenter had an immediate test, in which the ribbon was not attached to the mobile, but they did measure the kicks per minute. The experimenters waited 24 hours for day 2 of training; the training was identical to day 1. After this the experimenters had a 14 days delay until the next test. On day 13 reactivation was performed on half of the infants, and it consisted of the infant sitting in the crib with no ribbon attached to the mobile. During this step the experimenter jiggled the mobile for 3 minutes and recorded the kicks per minute. The other half of the infants were part of the control group, meaning they did not get a reactivation session. On day 14 all infants performed the 3 minute test, by sitting in the crib with no ribbon attached to the mobile while the experimenter

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