6-, 10-, and 12-month-olds remember complex dynamic events across 2 weeks

Abstract

Whereas infants’ ability to remember simple static material (e.g., pictures) has been documented extensively, we know surprisingly little about infants’ memory of dynamic events (i.e., events unfolding in time) in the first year after birth. Although there is evidence to suggest that infants show some kind of sensitivity toward complex dynamic events (i.e., events involving agents and a storyline) as indicated by visual engagement in the first year after birth, 16- to 18-month-olds are hitherto the youngest infants documented to remember such material. Using a visual paired-comparison (VPC) task, in Experiment 1 we examined 6-, 10-, and 12-month-olds’ (N = 108) ability to encode and remember cartoons involving complex dynamic events across 2 weeks. Results showed that all age groups remembered these cartoons. To investigate further the role of a complex storyline, in Experiment 2 we assessed the memory of 107 infants of the same age groups for similar cartoons but without coherent storyline information by scrambling the temporal presentation of the information in the cartoons. The results showed that the two youngest age groups did not remember this version. To our knowledge, this is the first experiment to document memory for such complex material in young infants using VPC.