THE ORGANIZATION OF REACTIVATED MEMORY IN INFANCY

The specificity of memory retrieval by 3-month-old infants was examine d in 3 experiments. All infants were trained in the mobile conjugate r einforcement paradigm to kick their feet to produce movement in an ove rhead crib mobile and were tested 2 weeks later. 24 hours prior to the test, subjects received a 3-min reminder treatment. The results of Ex periment 1 demonstrated that only the moving training mobile alleviate d forgetting after the g-week retention interval; forgetting was not a lleviated by exposure to the stationary training mobile or to the mobi le stands and ribbon alone. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 demonst rated that, once retrieved, the reactivated memory was highly specific to the conditions of original training. Furthermore, the memory attri butes that were the last to be forgotten (e.g., the general or global features) were the first to be retrieved following the reminder treatm ent. Conversely, those memory attributes that were forgotten first (e. g., the specific or local details) were the last to be retrieved. Thes e findings have important implications for infant memory retrieval, re miniscence, and infantile amnesia.