DEVELOPMENTAL-CHANGES IN THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND MEMORY RETRIEVAL

Four experiments examined how perception affects delayed recognition, visual pop out, and memory reactivation (priming) at 6 months. Infants discriminated cues (Ls, Ts, and +s) differing in spatial arrangement or number of primitive perceptual units (textons) or both in a delayed recognition task and exhibited adultlike visual pop-out effects in a priming task. Performance at 6 months resembled that at 3 months and a dult preattentive processing. Unlike at 3 months, however, at 6 months , an expectancy-based process overrode the perceptual characteristics of a novel pop-out stimulus in a delayed recognition test. These resul ts indicate that delayed recognition memory becomes more ''top down'' over the first half-year, whereas memory priming remains age invariant and perceptually driven.