Research At Manhattanville

My research at Manhattanville takes place in the memory development lab.  The lab is located in Brownson 29B.  We recruit children to come and participate in studies of reorientation in a small space.  

Research at Temple University

My research at Temple is in collaboration with Nora Newcombe.  Below is an abstract describing some of the recent research.

Action and Reorientation Ability: the role of restricted movement at 3 and 5 years

Research across a variety of species has revealed that mobile organisms share a powerful sensitivity to the geometric properties of enclosed spaces, and can use this information to reestablish spatial orientation after being disoriented (for review, see Cheng & Newcombe, in press).  However, research with children investigating the use of nongeometric (or featural) information in spatial reorientation has produced conflicting results.  When tested in a large enclosure (8’x12’) children as young as 18 months can use features to reorient (Learmonth, Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2001).  The contrast between these results and those of Hermer and Spelke has been shown to depend on the size of the space (Learmonth, Nadel & Newcombe, 2002).  But why is size important?

One explanation is that the size of the space influences the extent to which a child can engage in movement.  In three studies we investigated the role of action by restricting movement to the smaller space within the dimensions of a larger enclosure.  When boxes were located in the corner of the inner enclosure neither 3-year-olds nor 5-year-olds were able to use featural information to locate the correct corner. When boxes were placed in the corners of the large room and children pointed to their choices results differed sharply by age, with 3-year-olds not using featural information but 5-year-olds searching correctly.  When the enclosure was removed and replaced with markings on the floor results were identical.  These findings further illuminate children’s ability to integrate geometric and nongeometric information changes over development.

Research at Rutgers University

My research at Rutgers is in collaboration with Carolyn Rovee-Collier.  Below is a description some of the recent research.

This study investigates the types of reminders that can be used with six-month-old infants. Infants' memories are very specific in the first year of life. Young infants encode information not only about an event, but also about the context in which it occurs. The memory then includes incidental information about the physical context in which the event occurred. Contextual information can also be a retrieval cue for the memory of that event. Changing the context at the time of testing can disrupt retention in operant and deferred imitation tasks, even though the context was irrelevant to the task demands.

In this study with 6-month-old infants, we asked what aspects of the physical context in which infants learned a puppet imitation task might serve as an effective reactivation cue for the memory after it was forgotten. Previous research showed that 6-month-olds remember this task for 24 hours. Therefore, we attempted to remind infants of it by exposing them to an isolated component of the encoding context 1 or 2 weeks after they first learned the task and testing their retention 24 hours later. After a 1-week delay, infants were effectively reminded by exposure to the puppet for 8 seconds, 4 seconds or 2 seconds. In addition, and most importantly, a 5-min exposure to the experimenter was an effective reactivation. In the experimenter only reminder condition, infants did not see the puppet. After a 2-week delay, infants could still be reminded by exposure to the puppet (either with three more demonstrations or a ten second exposure), but exposure to the experimenter alone was no longer an effective reminder, however, if the distinctive mat on which infants sat during training was added to the reactivation treatment, then the combination of cues was an effective reminder. The efficacy of these contextual cues in reactivating the forgotten memory seem to be additive. These results document the importance of contextual cues in infant memory retrieval and support Spear's (1978) suggestion that increasing the number or type of cues in the reactivation treatment might enhance its efficacy.

For the final two groups we will use the previous result that infants trained on the puppet imitation task will show deferred imitation with a familiar experimenter who was only present at training, (not doing the actual training) 24 hours after training, but will not show deferred imitation of the actions on the puppet if tested by a novel experimenter. Theory indicates that even though the infants will show deferred imitation with the observer, they should not be able to use the observer as a reminder of the event because of her peripheral participation in the training event. These final two groups will separate out the experimenter as an effective reminder of the event from a person present at the event being an effective reminder simply because people are more memorable than puppets.