The development of visual short-term memory in infancy

描述（由申请人提供）：视觉短期记忆（VSTM）对于婴儿期的任务至关重要，如发展手眼协调和将单词与物体联系起来。因此，了解婴儿如何在VSTM中表示物体是理解他们如何学习周围物体的核心。此外，短期记忆的个体差异与语言理解能力的差异有关。因此，了解婴儿的短期记忆能力将对了解正常和异常的认知发展产生深远的影响。该项目的总体目标是加深我们对婴儿VSTM早期发育的特征和特征组合的认识。研究和理论强调了物体身份特征表征和物体位置表征之间的区分。在成人中，这两类特征存储在功能上和解剖上分离的VSTM子系统中，我们将研究这两种不同类型特征的婴儿VSTM是否具有独立的发育时间过程。此外，当代认知科学的一个核心问题是将特征绑定到完整的对象表征中，我们将探讨婴儿VSTM中特征绑定的发展。这个问题在婴儿期尤其重要，因为结合特征的能力对于像成年人一样表达物体是必不可少的。我们提出的实验将使用我们之前用来绘制颜色VSTM发展图表的偏好任务。利用该任务，我们将(a)精确测量VSTM对物体身份特征（颜色和方向；实验1和2）的发展时间过程，(b)将该发展时间过程与VSTM对位置的发展时间过程进行比较（实验3），以及(c)评估记忆中两个身份特征绑定和物体身份特征与位置绑定的特征绑定过程的发展（实验4、5和6）。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is crucially important for tasks that are significant in infancy, such as developing hand-eye coordination and associating words with objects. Understanding how infants represent objects in VSTM is therefore central to understanding how they come to learn about the objects around them. In addition, individual difference in short-term memory are associated with differences in language comprehension abilities. Thus, understanding infants' short-term memory abilities will have a profound impact on understanding both normal and abnormal cognitive development. The broad goal of this project is to deepen our knoweldge of the early development of infants' VSTM for features and combinations of features. Research and theory have emphasized a division between representations of object identity features and representations of object location. These two classes of features are stored in functionally and anatomically segregated VSTM subsystems in adults, and we will examine whether infants' VSTM for these two different types of features have independent developmental time courses. In addition, a central issue in contemporary cognitive science is the binding of features into integrated object representations, and we will explore the development of feature binding in infant VSTM. This issue is particularly important in infancy because the ability to bind features is essential for an adult-like representation of objects. The proposed experiments will use a preference task that we have previously used to chart the development of VSTM for color. Using this task, we will (a) precisely measure the developmental time course of VSTM for object identity features (color and orientation; Experiments 1 and 2), (b) compare this developmental time course with the developmental time course of VSTM for location (Experiment 3), and (c) assess the development of the processes that bind features together in memory, for both bindings of two identity features and bindings of object identity features with location (Experiments 4, 5, and 6).