The Effect of Crying on Long-Term Memory in Infancy

Abstract

The influence of crying on infants' long-term memory for a learned response was investigated in 3 experiments. In each, infants were trained to move a crib mobile containing 10 identical objects by means of kicking and were then exposed to a reinforcer containing only 2 of these components. This shift in component numerosity produced crying in 53% of the infants. Infants who cried in response to the reward shift evidenced no retention of the contingency 1 week later (Experiment 1) but did have excellent retention at 1 day (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, a brief reactivation treatment alleviated forgetting at 3 weeks regardless of the presence of crying in response to the change in mobiles. An unexpected recency effect characterized the efficacy of the reactivation treatment. The results indicate that crying in response to the violation of a reward-expectation habit functions as an amnesic agent to produce accelerated forgetting.