Eighteen-month-olds' memory for short movies of simple stories.

This study investigated twenty four 18-month-olds' memory for dynamic visual stimuli. During the first visit participants saw one of two brief movies (30 seconds) with a simple storyline displayed in four iterations. After 2 weeks, memory was tested in the visual paired comparison paradigm in which the familiar and the novel movie were contrasted simultaneously and displayed in two iterations for a total of 60 seconds. Eye-tracking revealed that participants fixated the familiar movie significantly more than the novel movie, thus indicating memory for the familiar movie. Furthermore, time-dependent analysis of the data revealed that individual differences in the looking-patterns for the first and second iteration of the movies were related to individual differences in productive vocabulary. We suggest that infants' vocabulary may be indicative of their ability to understand and remember the storyline of the movies, thereby affecting their subsequent memory.