Abstract
Visual memory for objects has been studied extensively in infants over the past 20 years, however, little is known about how they are formed when objects are embedded in naturalistic scenes. In adults, memory for objects in a scene show information accumulation over time as well as persistence despite interruptions (Melcher, 2001, 2006). In the present study, eye-tracking was used to investigate these two processes in 12-month-old infants (N = 19) measuring: (1) whether longer encoding time can improve memory performance (accumulation), and (2) whether multiple shorter exposures to a scene are equivalent to a single exposure of the same total duration (persistence). A control group of adults was also tested in a closely matched paradigm (N = 23). We found that increasing exposure time led to gains in memory performance in both groups. Infants were found to be successful in remembering objects with continuous exposures to a scene, but unlike adults, were not able to perform better than chance when interrupted. However, infants’ scan patterns showed evidence of memory as they continued the exploration of the scene in a strategic way following the interruption. Our findings provide insight into how infants are able to build representations of their visual environment by accumulating information about objects embedded in scenes.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Participants’ predicted accuracy increased by 3.8% for each second of additional encoding time, t(67) = 3.4, p = 0.001. These results replicate prior findings in similar tasks that showed that increased encoding time improves recall performance for complex, realworld objects in scenes (Melcher, 2001; Brady et al, 2009b)
While Melcher (2001) used verbal recall to assess memory performance in adults, in our version of the paradigm, we measured recognition memory to make the task appropriate for infants. (This modification did not affect the main pattern of results in adults, which replicated those found by Melcher)
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Memory for objects in a scene show information accumulation over time as well as persistence despite interruptions (Melcher, 2001, 2006). Visual memory is necessary to accumulate information obtained from the different fixations as the eyes scan the environment (Melcher, 2001; Hollingworth, 2004). This process requires building a complex representation that contains objects that are bound to locations in the scene’s spatial layout and stored in memory (Hollingworth, 2007). Accumulation and Persistence of Memory in Infants can be actively stored in VWM has significant consequences on learning and other adaptive functioning (Fukuda et al, 2010)
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