Visual Short-Term Memory in the First Year of Life: Capacity and Recency Effects

A span task was developed to assess the amount of information infants could hold in short-term memory. In this task, infants were presented with up to 4 items in succession and then tested for recognition by successively pairing each item with a novel one. A large sample of full-terms and low-birth-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 2001-07, Vol.37 (4), p.539-549
Main Authors: Rose, Susan A, Feldman, Judith F, Jankowski, Jeffery J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
Babies
Biological and medical sciences
Birth Weight
Capacity
Child development
Child psychology
Child, Preschool
Cognition
Comparative Analysis
Developmental psychology
Eyes & eyesight
Female
Follow-Up Studies
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Individual Development
Individual Differences
Infancy
Infant
Infant Behavior
Infants
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Memory
Memory Span
Memory, Short-Term
Newborn. Infant
Prospective Studies
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Recency Effect
Reproducibility of Results
Serial order
Short Term Memory
Sight
Time Factors
Videotape Recording
Visual Memory
Visual Perception
Visual Perception - physiology
Visual short term memory
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Summary:A span task was developed to assess the amount of information infants could hold in short-term memory. In this task, infants were presented with up to 4 items in succession and then tested for recognition by successively pairing each item with a novel one. A large sample of full-terms and low-birth-weight preterms (< 1,750 g) was tested longitudinally, at 5, 7, and 12 months of age. Results were similar for both groups: (a) Longer spans were more difficult, especially at the 2 younger ages; (b) memory capacity increased over the 1st year of life-whereas less than 25% of the sample could hold as many as 3-4 items in mind at once at the younger ages, nearly half could do so by 12 months of age; (c) there was a marked recency effect (greater memory for the final item) for spans of 3 and 4 at all ages; and (d) there were modest cross-age correlations, indicating that individual differences in memory capacity showed some stability from age to age.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.37.4.539