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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Published on: May 15, 2019

Relational memory during infancy: evidence from eye tracking.

Jenny Richmond¹, Charles A Nelson

¹Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. jrichmond@psy.unsw.edu.au

Developmental Science

|July 29, 2009

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Nine-month-old infants demonstrate relational memory, forming associations between items and their contexts. This early memory development, tracked by eye-tracking, suggests sophisticated cognitive abilities in infants.

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Last Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

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Published on: May 15, 2019

Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory

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Published on: August 15, 2010

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Published on: November 14, 2018

Area of Science:

Cognitive Development
Neuroscience
Developmental Psychology

Background:

Relational memory, crucial for cognitive functions, is thought to involve the hippocampus.
Understanding the emergence of relational memory in infancy is key to mapping early brain development.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether 9-month-old infants can encode and recall memories based on item relationships.
To explore the temporal dynamics of relational memory formation in early development.

Main Methods:

Utilized a novel eye-tracking paradigm to measure infant visual attention.
Infants were habituated to associations between faces and unique scenic backgrounds.
Tested infants' ability to recognize a face previously paired with a specific background scene.

Main Results:

Infants showed preferential looking towards the face associated with the familiar background.
The timing of this preferential looking varied with the delay between learning and testing.
Early preferential looking suggests rapid encoding of relational information.

Conclusions:

Nine-month-old infants possess the capacity for relational memory, encoding information about associations between items.
This finding indicates that the neural systems supporting relational memory, potentially including the hippocampus, are functional early in infancy.
Infants can maintain these relational memories over short delays, highlighting the development of memory consolidation processes.