O. Pascalis et al., LONG-TERM RECOGNITION MEMORY FOR FACES ASSESSED BY VISUAL PAIRED-COMPARISON IN 3-MONTH-OLD AND 6-MONTH-OLD INFANTS, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 24(1), 1998, pp. 249-260
It has been argued that operant conditioning is the only type of long-
term memory present in infants prior to 6 months of age. In this study
, memory for faces was investigated in 3- and 6-month-old infants with
a visual paired-comparison task. In Experiment 1, infants were habitu
ated to a face presented in different poses; recognition was assessed
after a 2-min or a 24-hr retention interval. The 6-month-old infants a
nd the male but not the female 3-month-old infants exhibited novelty p
references. A 2nd experiment showed that 3-month-old female infants we
re delayed relative to male infants in their face-processing ability r
ather than in their memory capacity. The results of Experiment 3 demon
strated in 3-month-olds an electrophysiological correlate of delayed r
ecognition memory. These findings are discussed in the context of the
neural systems thought to be involved in visual recognition memory (bu
t not in procedural memory), namely the limbic system.