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Updated: Aug 12, 2025
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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
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6-, 10-, and 12-month-olds remember complex dynamic events across 2 weeks
Trine Sonne1, Osman S Kingo1, Peter Krøjgaard1
1Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|January 25, 2023
Summary
Infants as young as 6 months can remember complex dynamic events, like cartoons with storylines. Memory for these events depends on the temporal coherence of the storyline.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Infant Memory
Background:
- Infants' memory for static stimuli is well-documented, but memory for dynamic events is less understood.
- Previous research suggests infants are sensitive to dynamic events, but the youngest documented to remember complex, storyline-based events were 16-18 months old.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the capacity of infants aged 6, 10, and 12 months to encode and recall complex dynamic events presented as cartoons.
- To determine the role of a coherent storyline in infant memory for dynamic events.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a visual paired-comparison (VPC) task to assess memory.
- Experiment 1: Infants (N=108) viewed cartoons with complex dynamic events for 2 weeks.
- Experiment 2: Infants (N=107) viewed similar cartoons with scrambled temporal information to assess storyline importance.
Main Results:
- All age groups (6, 10, 12 months) successfully remembered the dynamic events in Experiment 1.
- In Experiment 2, only 12-month-olds remembered the scrambled cartoons, indicating younger infants struggled without a coherent storyline.
Conclusions:
- This study provides the first evidence of memory for complex dynamic events in infants as young as 6 months.
- Infant memory for dynamic events is influenced by the presence of a coherent temporal storyline, particularly for younger infants.
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