Zsuzsa Kaldy
Rutgers University, Department of Psychology
Mar 13
The development of visual working memory in infancy
What do infants remember about briefly seen objects? How do infants use features to identify objects, and at what ages? Looking time studies were conducted to explore these issues. The findings show that there is a critical shift between 6 and 9 months of age: infants gain the ability to remember features, and use them to identify objects, even when their attention is distracted during memory maintenance. My results also imply that at 9 months, infants are both able identify objects based on shape and remember their particular locations, that is, bind object and spatial information.
In order to evaluate how well infants remember features that lie along different dimensions (color, shape, brightness), I will also describe a novel application of a preferential-looking procedure that allows one to compare different stimulus dimensions experimentally (an issue that has yet to be formally addressed in the developmental literature). This procedure circumvents the problems that can arise when one compares particular features that differ greatly in perceptual salience.