Memory Development Psychology 3717

Introduction When you think of developmental questions, typically, you think of kids However, your memory changes throughout life, just as all your other psychological traits do So we will talk about kids and adults Development need not always mean improvement….

awwwww Even at birth you know and remember lots of stuff Your mother ’ s and maybe your father ’ s voice Babies will stare longer at face like stimuli

Infantile amnesia Why? Brain immaturity? Lack of linguistic development? Events can be remembered though, especially if they are big ones

Things they can do Habituation paradigm – Stimulus attributes – Even concepts, abstract ones! Instrumental approaches – Recognition improves with age – Interference effects – Spacing effect – cues

imitation Teach older kids, verbal ones, a new task Building something for example Test retention Can go from simple to complex Regular effects show up!

Memory for Spatial locations There are a lot of occasions where people that study animal cognition and those that study infant and toddler cognition have a lot in common Both deal with subjects that have no way to directly tell you what they remember A good example of this is the work on toddler spatial memory based on Cheng ’ s work with rats

Cheng (1986) He then applied featural information – walls – corners The rats still made errors, though most of these were rotational errors He concluded that the rats were responding to the geometry of the box.

Hermer and Spelke (1994) Tried the Cheng task with toddlers and adults Disoriented the subjects Using a cue Toddlers are not unlike rats Adults are different, seem to follow the cue Same in Pike (2001)

adulthood It is all downhill from here… Hit your 70s, your brain shrinks… There is general cognitive slowing (probably) which accounts for some semantic memory problems Episodic memory declines too Could be due to encoding (Simon ’ s work)

Inhibition deficit hypothesis More susceptible to interference Longer reading times More easily distracted using distractor tasks Sustained activation of irrelevant material In sum, it is probably a combination of overall cognitive slowing and a problem with inhibition

conclusions The development that happens with kids in amazing Functionally sensible that we don ’ t have too many episodic memories from preverbal times There is decline, but the impact of that decline can be lessened with coping skills