Does infant memory expression reflect age at encoding or age at retrieval?

Do human infants express a memory acquired earlier in ontogeny in a manner appropriate to their age at encoding or their age at the time of retrieval? To answer this, we exploited the fact that retention is highly context dependent at 6 months but not at 8-9 months of age. Six-month-olds learned an operant response in one context, and their memory was maintained by monthly reinstatements in the original context. At 8 or 9 months of age, 1 month after the last (or only) reinstatement, infants were tested in either the same or a different context. During testing, infants' retention was no longer context dependent; rather, they responded robustly in both test contexts. These results revealed that infants expressed a memory acquired when they were younger in a manner appropriate to their test age. They were interpreted in terms of changes in the functional significance of context before and after infants self-locomote. Copyright 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.