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Updated: Dec 11, 2025

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
State-Dependent Memory in Infants
Sabine Seehagen1, Silvia Schneider1, Katharina Sommer1
1Ruhr University Bochum.
Abstract:
Why do infants remember some things and not others? Human infants frequently cycle through different states such as calm attentiveness, wakeful activity, and crying. Given that cognitive processes do not occur in isolation, such fluctuations in internal state might influence memory processing. In the present experiment, declarative memory in 9-month-old infants (N = 96) was heavily state dependent. Infants exhibited excellent retention of a deferred imitation task after a 15-min delay if their state at encoding was identical to their state at retrieval (e.g., calm). Infants failed to exhibit retention if their state at encoding was different from their state at retrieval (e.g., calm vs. animated). Infant memory processing depends on internal cues.
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