Memory development in the second year: for events or locations?
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Updated: Jul 27, 2026

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
James Russell1, Doreen Thompson
1Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK. jr111@cus.cam.ac.uk
Abstract:
We employed an object-placement/object-removal design, inspired by recent work on 'episodic-like' memory in scrub jays (Clayton, N. S., & Dickinson, A. (1998). Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays. Nature, 395, 272-274), to examine the possibility that children in the second year of life have event-based memories. In one task, a successful search could have been due to the recall of an object-removal event. In the second task, a successful search could only have been caused by recall of where objects were located. Success was general in the oldest group of children (21-25 months), while performance was broadly similar on the two tasks. The parsimonious interpretation of this outcome is that the first task was performed by location memory, not by event memory. We place these data in the context of object permanence development.
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