Discuss development of memory in infancy and toddlerhood, including recognition, recall, and short-term and long-term retention

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Methods devised to assess infants’ short-term memory, which require keeping in mind an increasingly longer sequence of very briefly presented visual stimuli,reveal that retention increases from one item at age 6 months to two to four items at 12 months.Operant conditioning and habituation techniques, which grant babies more time to process information, provide windows into early long-term memory. Both methods show that retention of visual events improves greatly with age. For example, 2-month-olds remember how to activate a mobile for 1 to 2 days after training, and 3-month-olds for one week. By 6 months, memory increases to two weeks. Furthermore, when 6-month-olds, after forgetting, are given a chance to reactivate the response themselves, their memory not only returns but extends dramatically, to about 17 weeks.
Habituation studies show that infants learn and retain a wide variety of information just by watching objects and events, sometimes for much longer time spans than in operant conditioning studies. Babies are especially captivated by the movements of objects and people.For example, 3- to 5-month-olds’ retention of the unusual movements of objects persists for at least three months.
The simplest form of memory is recognition, which involves noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced. As in the research just described, babies can indicate (by kicking, pressing a lever, or looking) whether a new stimulus is identical or similar to a previous one.Recall is more challenging because it involves remembering something not present. By the middle of the first year, infants are capable of recall, as indicated by their ability to find hidden objects and engage in deferred imitation. Recall improves steadily with age.