Infant memory
Encoding is the time when information is initially registered (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). Pathman and Bauer (2013) highlight that it must initially be encoded for memory to be reclaimed. It is after a memory has been encoded that it can be consolidated. Bauer et al. (2010) explain that paired- comparison is the oldest technique used by experimenters initially developed by Robert Fantz to examine and study infants’ memory 0-6-months of age. It is a technique whereby experimenters observe infants looking behaviors using a stimulus that they have generally recently been familiarised with (Bauer et al., 2010). Elicited imitation is a technique that assesses infant memory, a method that was founded by Piaget (Bauer et al., 2010). Bauer et al. (2010) describe the technique to be a process where the experimenter provides the infant participant with a sequence of actions (with the number of steps depending on their age) to complete a task by modeling them, immediately following the infant is allowed to imitate the movements. Focused attention is a process that “turns looking into seeing” it is understood that there are three components of attention being; arousal, selective attention, and executive attention. Arousal becomes visible from birth to – two-moths old. Following particular awareness emerges from two-months – 6-months old with executive attention following from six-months-old throughout infancy to toddlerhood Cheng et al., 2019, p. 1). This essay aims to assess methods used to study infant memory, including; paired-comparison, elicited imitation, and pupillometry. Besides, it examines encoding and identifies how encoding is used within the two methods.
- What is the Pupillometry method? What is the Pupillometry method: The pupillometry method refers to measuring pupil reactivity and size. It is a part of the clinical neurological exam for patients with a more excellent and wide variety of neurological injuries. For some time, it has been used in studying and researching psychology. For the last decades, pupillometry has evolved as a reliable and robust measure of cognitive processing within cognitive sciences and psychology. Different methodological and technological advancements have turned it into an expensive, tedious, and actively time-consuming procedure.
- What is Visual working memory? Working memory and attention have, in the past years, imposed capacity limitations to cognitive processing. Visual working refers to the visible picture formed inside people’s minds for a few seconds and disappears from human sight. During this period of the few seconds, a small subset of the information is highly transferred into the working memory.
The study by Snyder (2010) aimed to investigate and measure whether the late slow wave amplitude, measured at encoding, impacts a six-month-old infants’ performance within the paired-compassions test (Snyder, 2010). The study consisted of fifty-six six-month-old infants with a mix of both genders; thirty-one girls and twenty-five being. All participants were born at full term with no history of visual or neurological problems that families were aware of (Snyder, 2010). The participants were tested within one week of turning six-months of age. The final sample of data only consisted of children who completed both the encoding and test phases proficiently, providing good useful (Snyder, 2010). In addition to the fifty- six children, there was an additional sixty-three participant however their data was excluded from the final sample for a variety of reasons being; failure to finish the testing phase, leaning out of the camera’s view, problems with video recording during the testing phase, insufficient EPR data and behavioral testing (Snyder, 2010). All participants were recruited from a database of the University of Minnesota. The participants’ parents were contacted at birth and accepted their invitation to participate by returning a postcard (Snyder, 2010).
The tests were conducted within a laboratory setting one after the other. First, the encoding phase followed immediately after by the paired-comparison test (Snyder, 2010). The infant was seated on one of their parent’s laps, positioned approximately 60 centimeters away from the monitor for both parts. For the session’s duration, parents were blindfolded and directed to have no interaction with their child (Snyder, 2010). The study assessed infants’ neural mechanisms of memory formation by examining which event-related potentials (ERP’s) extracted during encoding anticipated infants’ behavioral performance within the paired- comparison. Consequently, they investigated their predications in the two phases (Snyder, 2010).
What are the FINDINGS?
The study was used to predict if event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to effectively monitor the brain activity in the first and initial encoding of the past and previous novel visual stimulus. Additionally, the study examined whether the ERP measures of encoding actively predicted the infant’s subsequent visual memory task performance. From the analysis, results indicated that a slow wave of the ERP component measured and showed the encoding predicted infants’ immediate performance within the paired comparison tasks of the amplitude towards the slow-wave and rate at temporal leads and right-central, which decreased with the stimulus repetition. Additionally, they significantly reduce with the right-anterior-temporal leads during the encoding associated withauthoritiesbetter and quality memory performance tests. Through contrast means, neither the amplitude nor the latency has negative central (Nc) components of the predicted infants after the paired-comparison tasks’ performance. The study’s findings are highly discussed concerning the biased and competitive models of memory and visual attention. Snyder (2010) explains that the study findings are correlated with similar previous results. The slow-wave extent at mid and right central and right anterior temporal leads decreased with the stimulus (Snyder, 2010).
The study’s main limitation would be the difference between Snyder presentation technique and the usual infant controlled paired-comparison and habituation procedures (Snyder, 2010). For example, within Snyder’s study, the infants repeatedly presented the stimulus for a fixed brief period. Compared, other tests suggest the inspiration for a continuous long period. Snyder (2010) notes there decision on the procedure was to collect ERP during the encoding phase. Besides, it is essential to note that the stimulus is frequently presented on the left and right side of the screen; simultaneously, it was sometimes displayed within the center of the screen (Snyder, 2010). Therefore it is questionable whether the participants were encoding the stimuli in the same way as others alike using central as a posed side by side displays of the inspiration.
Following a study by Pathman and Bauer (2013) explores infant memory with the primary objective of informing the elements of remembering and forgetting in the early years (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). This was done by investigating the difference in long term recall in a two-year-old by assessing the encoding and post encoding level of memory traces. This investigation was explored through two experiments (Pathman & Bauer, 2013).
The first experiment consisted of fifty-one participants (25 girls and 26 boys), six percent being African American and the remaining ninety-four percent were Caucasian. The participants were from various age groups ranging from 16-24.5 months-olds. There were 17 16-month-olds, 17 20-month-olds, and 17 24.5-month-olds (Pathman & Bauer, 2013).
The second experiment consisted of fifty-five participants aged between 16-24.5 months (29 girls and 26 boys), 11 percent being African American, with the rest of the participants being Caucasian (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). The participants within both experiments were children born in a local hospital whose parents had volunteered to participate in research, and both parents provided written consent for their child to participate (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). After each session, all infant participants received a small toy, and on completion of the last session, parents received a $10.00 gift receipt (Pathman & Bauer, 2013).
In the first experiment, the participants took part in three sessions; session one followed by session two one week later, followed by session three one month after. All sessions took place in a laboratory testing room; participants sat with their parents beside them at a table across the experiment’s conductor. For all sessions, participants had the same experiment conductor (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). All sessions were video-recorded and started with an initial 2-4 minute warm-up activity where the infant hand conductor played with commercial toys in aide to promote infants in becoming comfortable with the adult experimenting, the environment while also gaining an understanding of the turn-taking concept used within the elicited imitation phase (Pathman & Bauer, 2013).
In the second experiment, the participants took part in four sessions, session one followed by session two two-days later, then two weeks later, session three, finishing with session four one month after (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). The experiment took place in the same setting and procedure as experiment one ( a child, parent, and conductor of the investigation were seated alike, warm-up activity was conducted, and sessions were recorded) (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). For the study, experimenters used elicited imitation to obtain their data; participants were required to take part in a 2-4 step sequence to ‘make a gong’ dependent on their age (16-month-olds engaged in 2-step, 20-month-olds engaged in 3-step, and 24-month-old engaged in the 4 step sequence) (Pathman & Bauer, 2013).
What are the findings? WHAT DID THEY FIND??
The research results indicated that trace week one’s measures were a unique predictor of the one month delayed recall. It was asserted from experiment two that the high strength actively contributed to the unique variance in the one-month delayed recall. The results from these two assignments highlight the need for considering a post-encoding process within the explanations of the viability within the long-term memory during the infancy life. For this particular study, the researchers highlighted no limitations (Pathman & Bauer, 2013). Cheng et al. (2019) study the relationship between infants’ visual working memory (VWM) and focused attention. Cheng et al. (2019) use the pupillometry method, where experimenters examined and observed infants pupil dilation and anticipatory gaze responses. This study consisted of twenty-two 13-month old infants, twelve girls, and ten boys from Boston (Cheng et al., 2019).
Participants were required to attain and complete three trial sessions and completed 8.5 sessions in total. During the initial three sessions, participants were exposed to the cards that were ‘to be remembered’ during the encoding phase in addition to having a valid response (Cheng et al., 2019). The tests were conducted in a laboratory setting within the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Infants sat in-front of the eye-tracker monitor on their parent’s lap. For the duration of the testing, parents were requested to have no interaction with their child and wear a visor to cover their eyes (Cheng et al., 2019). To acknowledge thanks for participation in the study, parents of the infants that participated received a small gift along with a $20.00 (Cheng et al., 2019). The main method used within this study was pupillometry, whereby the experimenter used task-evoked pupil responses (TEPR) to identify changes in participants focused attention and its influence on their VWM using the monitor to track pupil dilation with infants responses to the cards (Cheng et al., 2019)
Limitations of this study?
This study did not show any significant limitations and hence were not easy to highlight the study’s limitations.
Are these studies similar in any way?
Observing the research questions, methodologies employed in the research methods, and the different results the research brings out, it is easy to note that the studies are similar. Additionally, the different strategies that can be used in early-childhood development and which can be of good importance in developing children during their early age include strategy experiences, activities that teachers and parents actively provide to their young child in support of their development greater use in their future lives.
Conclusion
From the thesis statement, the research’s main aim was to assess methods used to study infant memory, including; paired-comparison, elicited imitation, and pupillometry, and to examine encoding and identify how encoding is used within the two methods. The analysis shows that encoding can be used as the study findings correlate with similar previous findings. The forms can be used to research in a process whereby the extent of the slow-wave at mid and right central and right anterior temporal leads decreased with the stimulus’s exposure. The research methods and the predicted results are straightforward to examine to determine that they were useful in analyzing and giving out credible result s in answering the research questions.
Reference
Bauer, P., San Souci, P., & Pathman, T. (2010). Infant memory. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(2), 267-277. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.38
Cheng, C., Kaldy, Z., & Blaser, E. (2019). Focused attention predicts visual working memory performance in 13-month-old infants: A pupillometric study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 36, 100616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2019.100616
Pathman, T., & Bauer, P. (2013). Beyond initial encoding: Measures of the post-encoding status of memory traces predict long-term recall during infancy. Journal Of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(2), 321-338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2012.10.004
Snyder, K. (2010). Neural correlates of encoding predict infants’ memory in the paired-comparison procedure. Infancy, 15(3), 270-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00015.x