Measuring infant memory: does the ruler matter?

Although the mobile conjugate reinforcement, deferred imitation, and visual attention paradigms are commonly used to test memory processing by infants, there is often debate about the comparability of memory measured by these three procedures. In a series of experiments, we systematically compared 6-month-old infants' performance across all three procedures. Contrary to current claims, measures of memory obtained using the mobile conjugate reinforcement and deferred imitation paradigms were more similar than those obtained using the deferred imitation and visual attention paradigms. Copyright 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.