Hill W L, Borovsky D, Rovee-Collier C
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.
Dev Psychobiol. 1988 Jan;21(1):43-62. doi: 10.1002/dev.420210104.
Fifty-five 6- to 7-month-old human infants were trained in an operant conditioning procedure, adapted from a procedure developed for 3-month-olds, in which kicks were reinforced by conjugate movement of a mobile. Retention was assessed in a simple forgetting paradigm (Expt. 1) or in a reactivation paradigm (Expt. 2) with either the training mobile or a different one serving as the retrieval cue. In Experiment 1, retention was tested 1, 7, 14, or 21 days after training. When the training and test mobiles were the same, infants exhibited virtually no forgetting for 14 days, but forgetting was complete by 21. When the training and test mobiles were different, infants exhibited no retention, discriminating the novel mobile for as long as they could remember the contingency. In Experiment 2, when the training mobile was presented as a reminder, the forgetting previously seen after 21 days was alleviated; when a different mobile was the reminder, it was not. These findings reveal that the efficacy of a reminder is predicted by the efficacy of that same stimulus in cuing the original memory 24 hr following training. Although the 6-month-olds learned more rapidly and remembered longer than infants half their age, their memory processing was described by the same basic principles.
55名6至7个月大的人类婴儿接受了操作性条件反射程序的训练，该程序改编自为3个月大婴儿开发的程序，其中婴儿的踢腿动作通过移动装置的共轭运动得到强化。在简单遗忘范式（实验1）或再激活范式（实验2）中评估记忆保持情况，训练时使用的移动装置或不同的移动装置作为检索线索。在实验1中，在训练后1天、7天、14天或21天测试记忆保持情况。当训练和测试使用的移动装置相同时，婴儿在14天内几乎没有遗忘，但到21天时遗忘完全。当训练和测试使用的移动装置不同时，婴儿没有表现出记忆保持，只要他们还记得这种关联，就会辨别出新的移动装置。在实验2中，当呈现训练时使用的移动装置作为提示时，之前在21天后出现的遗忘得到缓解；当使用不同的移动装置作为提示时，则没有缓解。这些发现表明，提示的效果由该相同刺激在训练后24小时提示原始记忆的效果所预测。尽管6个月大的婴儿比年龄只有他们一半的婴儿学习得更快、记忆得更久，但他们的记忆处理遵循相同的基本原理。
