The organization of reactivated memory in infancy.

The specificity of memory retrieval by 3-month-old infants was examined in 3 experiments. All infants were trained in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm to kick their feet to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile and were tested 2 weeks later. 24 hours prior to the test, subjects received a 3-min reminder treatment. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that only the moving training mobile alleviated forgetting after the 2-week retention interval; forgetting was not alleviated by exposure to the stationary training mobile or to the mobile stands and ribbon alone. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that, once retrieved, the reactivated memory was highly specific to the conditions of original training. Furthermore, the memory attributes that were the last to be forgotten (e.g., the general or global features) were the first to be retrieved following the reminder treatment. Conversely, those memory attributes that were forgotten first (e.g., the specific or local details) were the last to be retrieved. These findings have important implications for infant memory retrieval, reminiscence, and infantile amnesia.