6-MONTHS OLDS AND DELAYED ACTIONS: AN EARLY SIGN OF AN EMERGING EXPLICIT MEMORY?

Written by Mikael HEIMANN, Katarina NILHEIM on 15 December 2006. Posted in Special issue: Typical And Atypical Development, Guest Editors: Oana BENGA, Thea IONESCU, Volume VIII, Nr. 3-4

Abstract:

In 1996 Barr, Dowden and Hayne reported that 6-month-old infants imitate new actions with objects after a substantial delay. This is a finding in need of independent replications and the study reported here presents one such attempt. Forty-five 6 months old Swedish infants (22 girls) participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to either an experimental (n=30) or a control condition (n=15). The procedure replicates the method used by Barr et al. with one exception: The imposed delay was 10 minutes instead of 24 hours. Overall it was found that the children in the imitation group displayed significantly more target acts than the children in the control group and it is concluded that infants are capable of using deferred imitation as means for learning new actions already at 6 months.

Keywords: deffered imitation, explicit memory, infancy