Visual Short Term Memory in Infancy

描述（由申请人提供）：视觉短期记忆至关重要 对于婴儿期的重要任务，如发展手眼， 协调和关联词与对象。因此，了解婴儿的 短期记忆能力将大大增加我们对 正常发展。不像长期记忆，它有一个几乎无限的 短期记忆的容量非常有限，这对 对认知的许多其他方面的影响。例如减少 短期记忆能力可能导致一个发展中的系统专注于更小的 输入的组块，促进语言和其他 认知能力因此，了解婴儿的短期记忆 能力对于理解认知能力的一般限制是很重要的。 发展该项目的目标是开发敏感的 评估婴儿期短期记忆的程序， 以确定婴儿的短期记忆能力如何类似于 与年龄较大的儿童和成人不同。第一年，两个 将进行实验，以评估两个有用的 变化检测程序，用于评估婴儿的视觉短期记忆。在 一个程序，婴儿对变化的偏好超过了不变的刺激， 流将被观察。其逻辑是，如果婴儿能记住这些项目， 在显示器中，它们将检测到该改变并偏好（即，look longer at） 改变的溪流胜过保持不变的溪流。第二个程序将 评估婴儿学习变化（或不变）流的能力， 与他们准确地转动头部所表示的奖励相关联 找到赏金的来源如果婴儿察觉到变化（或没有变化）， 他们更有可能把头转向奖励刺激， 他们没有检测到变化（或没有变化）。其逻辑是， 正确地把他们的头只有当项目的数量在变化（或 不改变）阵列不超过它们的短期存储器容量。在 在项目的第二年，这两个程序中比较敏感的一个将是 用于确定婴儿的短期记忆能力， 婴儿和成年人一样，可以记住多特征物体， 单一特征对象。这些实验将提供重要的基础 用于研究婴儿期的短期记忆

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual short-term memory is crucially important for tasks significant in infancy such as developing hand-eye coordination and associating words with objects. Thus, understanding infants' short-term memory abilities will add significantly to our understanding of normal development. Unlike long-term memory, which has a virtually unlimited capacity, short-term memory has a very limited capacity, and this has serious consequences for many other aspects of cognition. For example, reduced short-term memory capacity may lead a developing system to focus on smaller chunks of the input, facilitating the acquisition of language and other cognitive abilities. Thus, understanding of infants' short-term memory abilities is important for understanding the general constraints on cognitive development. The goals of the proposed project are to develop sensitive procedures to assess short-term memory in infancy and to use those procedures to determine how infants' short-term memory abilities are similar to and different from those of older children and adults. In the first year, two experiments will be conducted to evaluate the usefulness of two change-detection procedures for assessing infants' visual short-term memory. In one procedure, infants' preference for changing over non-changing stimulus streams will be observed. The logic is that if infants can remember the items in the display, they will detect the change and prefer (i.e., look longer at) streams that change over those that remain the same. The second procedure will evaluate infants' ability to learn that changing (or non-changing) streams are associated with a reward as indicated by their accurately turning their head toward the source of that reward. If infants detect a change (or no change), they will be more likely to turn their head toward the rewarding stimulus than of they do not detect a change (or no change). The logic is that infants w ill correctly turn their head only when the number of items in the changing (or non-changing) array does not exceed their short-term memory capacity. In the second year of the project, the more sensitive of these two procedures will be used to determine the capacity of short-term memory in infants and whether infants, like adults, can remember multiple-feature objects just as easily as single-feature objects. These experiments will provide an important foundation for the study of short-term memory in infancy.