THE EFFECT OF REPEATED REACTIVATIONS ON MEMORY SPECIFICITY IN INFANCY

The cues that reactivate forgotten memories of young infants are highl y specific. At the time of initial reminding, if either the cue or con text differs from that originally present during encoding, then the me mory is not recovered. In three experiments, we asked whether this spe cificity decreases over repeated reactivations. Three-month-old infant s, trained in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm with a parti cular cue in a particular context, received multiple reactivation trea tments after their training memory was forgotten; either the cue or th e context was changed during the final reminder. For a given age of th e memory, context specificity was eliminated after fewer retrievals th an cue specificity, and the number of retrievals required to eliminate specificity interacted with the age of the memory. These results conf irm that different memory attributes become inaccessible at different rates and that repeatedly retrieved and older memories are likely to b e less detailed. This transformation may underlie reconstructive memor y in linguistic individuals. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.