GLOBAL AND LOCAL PROCESSING OF INCIDENTAL INFORMATION AND MEMORY RETRIEVAL AT 6 MONTHS

In five experiments, we examined the role of global and local cues in memory retrieval in infancy. Six-month-old infants were trained at hom e in a distinctive context (playpen liner) to kick to move a mobile. T he liners were yellow and displayed either green stripes, green square s aligned vertically in stripe-like columns, or green squares in a gri d pattern. The stripes and columns liners had a similar global configu ration but different local components; the columns and grid liners had identical local components but different global configurations. When infants were tested 24 h after training in the presence of context lin ers that differed from the training context in either global configura tions or local features, their memory retrieval was disrupted (Experim ents 1 and 2). However, a change from stripes to columns failed to dis rupt memory retrieval, even though the reverse change, from columns to stripes, did. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 revealed that this asymmetry wa s due to the fact that, when discriminative local information is not d irectly associated with training, a postperceptual strategy enables in fants to disregard a mismatch in local information between training an d test contexts and to generalize on the basis of a match in global in formation during the 24-h retention test. Thus, infants encode and rem ember for substantial periods of time both global configuration inform ation and local component information in the incidental context in whi ch an event occurs and flexibly utilize this information when respondi ng to new events. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.