Jeffrey Fagen - US grants

Previous research indicates that young infants readily learn to move an overhead mobile by means of their own footkicks (mobile conjugate reinforcement), and they persist in this instrumental behavior when presented with the nonmoving mobile days or weeks later. Altering the reinforcing context by making changes in the details of the mobile reinforcer (e.g., from 10- to 2-components) produce crying in some infants. Preliminary research indicates that this crying (and its underlying negative affective state) produces accelerated forgetting of the task such that infants who cry do not show retention of the task one week later when those who do not cry continue to perform the conditioned response at above-baseline levels. The present research will continue the investigation of the interaction of negative affect and memory for acquired associations using the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm. Negative affect will be produced in young infants by various contextual changes and retention will be measured by assessing the production of the previously trained response at various retention intervals. These studies will provide some of the first direct evidence linking affect and cognition in infancy and, as such, will contribute to our knowledge of early development. In addition, these findings will aid educators, clinicians, and parents in understanding how and why infants adjust (or fail to adjust) to new environments.

Previous research indicates that young infants readily learn to move an overhead crib mobile by means of their own kicks (mobile conjugate reinforcement) and they persist in this instrumental behavior when presented with the mobile days or weeks later. Altering the reinforcer by making changes in the details of the mobile (e.g., changing the number of mobile components from 10 to 2) produces crying in some infants. Infants who fail to cry in response to this shift show memory of the contingency for longer periods than those who cry. This indicates that crying in infants (and its associated emotional state) may function as an amnesic agent in that it produces accelerated forgetting (retrograde amnesia). The present research will continue the investigation of the interaction of affect and memory in infancy. The experiments to be conducted have two major objectives. First, they will investigate the processes associated with the amnesia by focusing on the role of affective context in infant memory. This will aid in the understanding of how and why crying has its amnesic effect. Second, they will focus on the issue of the stability of individual differences in both negative affect and memory across different learning/memory procedures. These studies will provide some of the first direct evidence linking affect and cognition in infancy and will contribute to our growing knowledge of memory and early development. The study of how infants react to violations of their learned expectancies, the variables that influence this reaction, and the role of various reactions on memory, will aid educators, clinicians, and parents in understanding how and why infants adjust, or fail to adjust, to new environments, as well as the possible long-term consequences of adjustment failure. In addition, the data collected will provide additional baselines against which deviations from the norm may one day be assessed.

DESCRIPTION: Studies of the role of context in memory storage and retrieval provide a window through which investigators can gain an understanding of species-general and species-specific memory organization. Context refers to the background stimuli that are present when we learn something. Although these stimuli are not directly related to what we are learning, they can affect our ability to remember what we have learned. For example, changes in the context between learning and retention testing can disrupt retrieval. One organism in which a detailed study of contextual effects on retrieval has begun to provide unique information about memory organization is the human infant. This research has utilized a simple paradigm in which infants learn to move an overhead mobile by kicking one of their feet. Retention of the association between kicking and mobile movement is assessed by returning the infant to the experimental arrangement to see if the kicking response will occur at a rate that is not different from what was at the conclusion of learning and above what it was prior to learning. Research has found, for example, that 3-month-old infants who learn to move the mobile in the presence of either a highly distinctive bumper surrounding their crib, or while a selection of music is playing in the background, will not demonstrate retrieval at long intervals if the crib bumper or music present during the test of retention differs from what it had been during learning. Very different results have been obtained with ambient odor as the context. Here, changing the odor between learning and testing, or having no odor present during testing, disrupts retention even at short retention intervals. Furthermore, at longer retention intervals, forgetting occurs even when the original training odor is present during the retention test. The present research will delve further into the mystery of why olfactory context affects infant memory differently from visual or auditory context. This will aid our understanding of how infants process, store, and retrieve information. It will also add to the growing body of knowledge about early cognitive development, and assist in the establishment of definitions of normative development against which deviations can be evaluated.