CONTINUITY IN VISUAL RECOGNITION MEMORY - INFANCY TO 11 YEARS

This study demonstrates continuity in visual recognition memory from e arly infancy to later childhood. Visual recognition memory, assessed w ith a paired-comparison task at 7 months, correlated significantly wit h visual recognition memory from a span task at 11 years, r = .35. Thi s relation remained significant even when other measures of memory at ii years were controlled, indicating that some of the variance in the infancy measure was related uniquely to later recognition memory. Cont rolling for Ii-year recognition memory partly explained the relation b etween the infancy measure and 11-year IQ (reported in Rose & Feldman, 1995), however, it was those aspects of 11-year recognition memory sh ared with other 11-year measures of memory which accounted for the inf ancy-IQ relation, not those unique to recognition. Better infant perfo rmance was also associated with faster 11-year retrieval speed (as ind exed by response time); however, unlike other aspects of speed studied earlier (encoding and perceptual speed), retrieval speed was not invo lved in the infancy-Iq relation.