INFANTS FORGETTING OF CORRELATED ATTRIBUTES AND OBJECT RECOGNITION

Infants as young as 3 months of age can encode the relations among obj ect features. Because object recognition depends critically upon a mat ch between perceived feature configurations and representations of the object in long-term memory, the present experiments focused on infant s' long-term memory for feature correlations. In 3 experiments with 72 3-month-olds, we documented the forgetting functions of different fea ture correlations, examined their relation to infants' memory for indi vidual features, and replicated the findings with different stimuli. I nfants were trained to activate a mobile composed of two kinds of bloc ks that differed in color, the figures displayed on them, and the figu res' colors and were tested after different delays with recombinations of either the block colors, the figures, or the figure colors. Infant s remembered some of the original feature combinations for up to 3 day s but forgot all of them after 4 days. Even after 4 days, however, inf ants remembered the individual features that had entered into the orig inal combinations. These results demonstrate that very young infants n ot only encode the relations among object features but also remember t hem for several days. Moreover, there is a dissociation in memory betw een features and feature relations: Feature relations are forgotten so oner than the individual features that comprise those relations.