Bearce Karen Hildreth, Rovee-Collier Carolyn
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2006 Apr;93(4):357-76. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2005.10.002. Epub 2005 Dec 6.
In previous research on priming (reactivation) with 3-month-olds, two primes recovered a forgotten memory faster than one, suggesting that prior priming had increased the accessibility of the forgotten memory. Exploiting the fact that the minimum duration of a prime indexes the accessibility of the forgotten memory, we currently examined whether prior priming also reduces the minimum effective prime duration. In three experiments, 60 3-month-olds learned an operant task, forgot it, and then were exposed to successive primes either 1 day and 1 week after forgetting (Experiment 1) or 1 and 2 weeks after forgetting (Experiment 2). In both cases, prior priming reduced the minimum duration of the second prime, a result that was independent of the duration of the first prime (Experiment 3). These findings confirm that priming increases the accessibility of a latent memory and raise the possibility that repeated priming underlies the extended memorability of persons and events that infants encounter sporadically.
