Memory Development

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Memory Development

• Psychology 3717

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Introduction

• When you think of developmental questions,
  typically, you think of kids
• However, your memory changes throughout life,
  just as all your other psychological traits do
• So we will talk about kids and adults
• Development need not always mean improvement.

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awwwww

• Even at birth you know and remember lots of stuff
• Your mothers and maybe your fathers voice
• Babies will stare longer at face like stimuli

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Infantile amnesia

• Why?
• Brain immaturity?
• Lack of linguistic development?
• Events can be remembered though, especially if
  they are big ones

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Things they can do

• Habituation paradigm
• Stimulus attributes
• Even concepts, abstract ones!
• Instrumental approaches
• Recognition improves with age
• Interference effects
• Spacing effect
• cues

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imitation

• Teach older kids, verbal ones, a new task
• Building something for example
• Test retention
• Can go from simple to complex
• Regular effects show up!

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Memory for Spatial locations

• There are a lot of occasions where people that
  study animal cognition and those that study
  infant and toddler cognition have a lot in common
• Both deal with subjects that have no way to
  directly tell you what they remember
• A good example of this is the work on toddler
  spatial memory based on Chengs work with rats

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Cheng (1986)

• He then applied featural information
• walls
• corners
• The rats still made errors, though most of these
  were rotational errors
• He concluded that the rats were responding to the
  geometry of the box.

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Hermer and Spelke (1994)

• Tried the Cheng task with toddlers and adults
• Disoriented the subjects
• Using a cue
• Toddlers are not unlike rats
• Adults are different, seem to follow the cue
• Same in Pike (2001)

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adulthood

• It is all downhill from here
• Hit your 70s, your brain shrinks
• There is general cognitive slowing (probably)
  which accounts for some semantic memory problems
• Episodic memory declines too
• Could be due to encoding (Simons work)

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Inhibition deficit hypothesis

• More susceptible to interference
• Longer reading times
• More easily distracted using distractor tasks
• Sustained activation of irrelevant material
• In sum, it is probably a combination of overall
  cognitive slowing and a problem with inhibition

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conclusions

• The development that happens with kids in amazing
• Functionally sensible that we dont have too many
  episodic memories from preverbal times
• There is decline, but the impact of that decline
  can be lessened with coping skills