Early declarative memory for location

Abstract

The abilities of 7.5‐month‐old infants to recall the location of hidden objects after delays averaging 90 seconds were investigated in three experiments. Various kinds of events were introduced during the delays in order to examine the stability of early location memory. Recall, as shown by reaching towards the correct location, was most clearly found when the infants were allowed either to remain seated facing the hiding locations (Expt 1) or were turned around and immediately re‐seated (Expt 2) during the delays. In both experiments, the infants’ attention was diverted from the hiding places, but during all or most of the delay the infants were facing the locations. Recall was dampened when infants were removed from the immediate location of the hiding and engaged in other activities such as looking at a picture during the delay (Expt 3). Further analyses indicated an effect for age that coincides with other research on location memory: evidence for recall was more clearly found for the older, but not the younger, 7‐month‐olds.