Effortlessly strengthening infant memory: associative potentiation of new learning

We recently discovered that young infants learn a new association better in the presence of a prior association than when they learn it alone - a phenomenon we call associative potentiation. When 6-month-olds observed actions modeled on a puppet (remembered for 1 day) in the presence of a toy train they had learned to activate (remembered for 2 weeks), they remembered the demonstration for 2 weeks too. Currently, we examined the generality of associative potentiation. We found that when 6-month-olds learned the train task (remembered for 5 days) in the presence of two previously associated puppets (remembered for 4 weeks); they remembered the train task for 4 weeks too - more than five times longer. We conclude that associative potentiation is a general phenomenon: Cues for any stronger prior association will correspondingly increase the memory strength of any weaker new association that young infants learn in their presence, eliminating the need for repeated practice. We view associative potentiation as an adaptive mechanism that counteracts the rapid forgetting of younger infants by instantly increasing the strength of their new learning to a level characteristic of older infants. Neuromaturational models of infant memory cannot account for associative potentiation, but an ecological model does.