Hartshorn K, Rovee-Collier C, Gerhardstein P, Bhatt R S, Klein P J, Aaron F, Wondoloski T L, Wurtzel N
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 1998 Jul;33(1):61-78. doi: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2302(199807)33:1<61::aid-dev6>3.0.co;2-q.
In two experiments with 260 infants between 2 and 12 months of age, we examined how differences between the conditions of encoding and retrieval affect retention. Initially, 9- and 12-month-olds were tested with a different cue (Experiment 1) or in a different context (Experiment 2) after delays spanning their respective forgetting functions. These data were then combined with corresponding data previously collected from 2-to 6-month-olds trained and tested in an equivalent task. The resulting analyses revealed that the specificity constraints on memory retrieval become progressively looser at the extremes of the forgetting function with age. With increasing age, retention was less affected by cue changes after shorter absolute delays and, except at 6 months, by context changes after longer absolute delays. This pattern dovetails with evidence of decreasing specificity in the retrieval cues required for deferred imitation during infants' 2nd year and reveals that the memory abilities of older children evolve gradually from early in infancy.
在两项针对260名2至12个月大婴儿的实验中，我们研究了编码和检索条件之间的差异如何影响记忆保持。最初，9个月和12个月大的婴儿在经历了各自遗忘函数的延迟后，分别用不同的线索（实验1）或在不同的情境中（实验2）进行测试。然后，这些数据与之前在一项等效任务中对2至6个月大婴儿进行训练和测试时收集的相应数据相结合。结果分析表明，随着年龄增长，在遗忘函数的极端情况下，对记忆检索的特异性限制逐渐放宽。随着年龄的增加，在较短的绝对延迟后，记忆保持受线索变化的影响较小；除了6个月大时，在较长的绝对延迟后，记忆保持受情境变化的影响较小。这种模式与婴儿第二年延迟模仿所需检索线索特异性降低的证据相吻合，并表明年龄较大儿童的记忆能力从婴儿早期就开始逐渐发展。
