Remember What? Working Memory Capabilities in Infancy
Open Access
- Author:
- Slomowitz, Rebecca Faith
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Jennifer Mary Zosh, Thesis Supervisor
Pauline Bernadette Guerin, Thesis Honors Advisor
Pauline Bernadette Guerin, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- working memory
infants
object representations - Abstract:
- Research has revealed that both infants (Feigenson & Carey, 2004) and adults (Luck and Vogel, 1997) have similar capacities of about 3-4 items in working memory. However, one dramatic difference exists. Specifically, when infants are presented with groups of similar objects that surpass their working memory limits, they experience the phenomena of catastrophic forgetting (Feigenson & Carey, 2004) while adults will successfully remember up to their memory limit. Catastrophic forgetting is marked by a complete failure of working memory when capacity is exceeded (Feigenson & Carey, 2004, Feigenson & Halberda, 2008). Recent work suggests that when infants are presented with highly varied objects, infants do not experience catastrophic forgetting and instead remember up to their memory limit (Zosh & Feigenson, 2015). To date, infant working memory studies typically used objects or a combination of objects and animals as the targets for working memory. Here, we investigate whether infants have better working memory capabilities for human-like stimuli (dolls). Previous work suggests that infants privilege information about humans over other types of information and that they show enhanced cognitive capabilities when conspecifics (other humans) are used as stimuli (Bonatti, Frot, Zangl, & Mehler, 2002). The current study employs the manual search paradigm (Feigenson & Carey, 2004) to test whether infants experience catastrophic forgetting when confronted with an array of non-identical dolls exceeding their memory capacity.