Elsevier

Infant Behavior and Development

Volume 19, Issue 3, July–September 1996, Pages 309-323
Infant Behavior and Development

Location memory in healthy preterm and full-term infants

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-6383(96)90031-4Get rights and content

Abstract

Current research suggests that preterm birth, in and of itself, can have important consequences for the development of cognitive abilities. The research reported here investigated the development of egocentric location memory, and related attention behaviors, in preterm and full-term infants. In Experiment 1, healthy preterm and full-term infants were tested longitudinally at 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5 months of age on a location memory task. The preterm infants were tested at corrected age (i.e., age since expected due date). In this task, infants saw a toy lion hidden at one of two identical locations, a delay was imposed (5, 10, and 30 s at 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5 months, respectively), and then the lion either reappeared at the correct location (expected test event) or at the incorrect location (unexpected test event). At each age tested, the infants looked significantly longer at the unexpected than expected event, as if they remembered the correct location of hiding and found the reappearance of the lion at the incorrect location surprising. There were no reliable differences between the full-term and preterm infants. Results from a control experiment (Experiment 1A) suggest that the longer looking times to the unexpected event were not due to superficial differences between the two test events. Examination of attention behaviors (i.e., mean length of looks and trial length) during the encoding period also revealed no reliable differences between the preterm and full-term infants. However, looking times to the test events, and mean length of looks during the encoding period, decreased reliably with age. Experiment 2 was conducted to investigate whether the observed changes in attention could be attributed repeated exposure to the test events or to longer delay intervals. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the observed changes in attention were not due to either of these factors. Together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that (a) even very young infants can represent and remember the location of a hidden object, (b) attention behaviors during the location memory task change reliably with age, and (c) uncomplicated premature birth has no obvious effect on the development of location memory and related attentional abilities during the first 6.5 months corrected age.

References (33)

  • R. Baillargeon et al.

    Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence

    Child Development

    (1991)
  • M. Bornstein et al.

    Continuity in mental development from infancy

    Child Development

    (1986)
  • J. Colombo et al.

    Individual differences in early visual attention: Fixation time and information processing

  • J. Colombo et al.

    Individual differences in infant visual attention: Are shorter lookers faster processors or feature processors?

    Child Development

    (1991)
  • J. Colombo et al.

    Infant visual attention in the paired-comparison paradigm: Test-retest and attention-performance relations

    Child Development

    (1988)
  • J. Colombo et al.

    The stability of visual habituation during the first year of life

    Child Development

    (1987)
  • Cited by (0)

    Portions of this work were supported by NSF Grant no. BNS 9122493 to L.N. and T.W. and by the McDonnell-Pew Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Arizona. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dana Narter and the students working in the Infant and Child Developmental Lab at the University of Arizona for their help with data collection, Mark Bakarich for technical support, Steve Holland for artistic support, and all the parents who allowed their infants to participate in this study.

    View full text