Techniques used to study memory

Techniques used to assess infants’ memory

Infants do not have the language ability to report on their memories and so verbal reports cannot be used to assess very young children’s memory. Throughout the years, however, researchers have adapted and developed a number of measures for assessing both infants’ recognition memory and their recall memory. Habituation and operant conditioning techniques have been used to assess infants’ recognition memory and the deferred and elicited imitation techniques have been used to assess infants’ recall memory.

• Visual paired comparison procedure (relies on habituation): infants are first presented with pairs of visual stimuli, such as two black-and-white photos of human faces, for a fixed amount of time; then, after being familiarized with the two photos, they are presented with the "familiar" photo and a new photo. The time spent looking at each photo is recorded. Looking longer at the new photo indicates that they remember the "familiar" one. Studies using this procedure have found that 5- to 6-month-olds can retain information for as long as fourteen days.
• Operant conditioning technique: infants are placed in a crib and a ribbon that is connected to a mobile overhead is tied to one of their feet. Infants notice that when they kick their foot the mobile moves – the rate of kicking increases dramatically within minutes. Studies using this technique have revealed that infants’ memory substantially improves over the first 18-months. Whereas 2- to 3-month-olds can retain an operant response (such as activating the mobile by kicking their foot) for a week, 6-month-olds can retain it for two weeks, and 18-month-olds can retain a similar operant response for as long as 13 weeks.
• Deferred imitation technique: an experimenter shows infants a unique sequence of actions (such as using a stick to push a button on a box) and then, after a delay, asks the infants to imitate the actions. Studies using deferred imitation have shown that 14-month-olds’ memories for the sequence of actions can last for as long as four months.
• Elicited imitation technique: is very similar to the deferred imitation technique; the difference is that infants are allowed to imitate the actions before the delay. Studies using the elicited imitation technique have shown that 20-month-olds can recall the action sequences twelve months later.
• Researchers use a variety of tasks to assess older children and adults' memory. Some examples are:
  • Paired associate learning - when one learns to associate one specific word with another. For example when given a word such as "safe" one must learn to say another specific word, such as "green". This is stimulus and response.
  • Free recall - during this task a subject would be asked to study a list of words and then later they will be asked to recall or write down as many words that they can remember. Earlier items are affected by retroactive interference (RI), which means the longer the list, the greater the interference, and the less likelihood that they are recalled. On the other hand, items that have been presented lastly suffer little RI, but suffer a great deal from proactive interference (PI), which means the longer the delay in recall, the more likely that the items will be lost.
  • Recognition - subjects are asked to remember a list of words or pictures, after which point they are asked to identify the previously presented words or pictures from among a list of alternatives that were not presented in the original list.
  • Detection paradigm - Individuals are shown a number of objects and color samples during a certain period of time. They are then tested on their visual ability to remember as much as they can by looking at testers and pointing out whether the testers are similar to the sample, or if any change is present.