Reactivation of Toddlers' Event Memory

Abstract

Toddlers of 14 and 18 months learned to produce target actions for six activities, were allowed to forget their training, and were reminded of the activities 8 or 10 weeks later, depending on their age. Reminders were administered in a memory-reactivation paradigm in which toddlers were shown the target actions of three of the six activities but were not allowed to imitate the modelled actions. Toddlers were tested for their recall of all six activities 24 hours after the reactivation treatment. Toddlers who were passively exposed to three activities during the reactivation session recalled more activities than controls who either were not reminded or did not originally engage in the activities. This study reveals that 14- and 18-month-olds encode components of an event associatively and that they are able to remember seemingly forgotten components through passive re-exposure to other components of the event.