Persistence and Accumulation of Visual Memories for Objects in Scenes in 12-Month-Old Infants

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Sylvia B. Guillory¹  Zsuzsa Kaldy² 

[1] Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United States;Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

关键词: visual memory;    infants;    encoding;    persistence;    accumulation;    interruption;    objects;    scenes;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02454

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Visual memory for objects has been studied extensively in infants over the past 20 years, however, little is known about how they are formed when objects are embedded in naturalistic scenes. In adults, memory for objects in a scene show information accumulation over time as well as persistence despite interruptions ( Melcher, 2001 , 2006 ). In the present study, eye-tracking was used to investigate these two processes in 12-month-old infants ( N = 19) measuring: (1) whether longer encoding time can improve memory performance (accumulation), and (2) whether multiple shorter exposures to a scene are equivalent to a single exposure of the same total duration (persistence). A control group of adults was also tested in a closely matched paradigm ( N = 23). We found that increasing exposure time led to gains in memory performance in both groups. Infants were found to be successful in remembering objects with continuous exposures to a scene, but unlike adults, were not able to perform better than chance when interrupted. However, infants’ scan patterns showed evidence of memory as they continued the exploration of the scene in a strategic way following the interruption. Our findings provide insight into how infants are able to build representations of their visual environment by accumulating information about objects embedded in scenes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY