BABIES REMEMBER NOTHING BUT A GOOD TIME
Parents who spend
their time playing with and talking to their five-month-old baby may wonder
whether their child remembers any of it a day later
Thanks to a new BYU
study, we now know that they at least remember the good times.
The study, published
in Infant Behavior and Development, shows that babies are more
likely to remember something if there is a positive emotion, or affect, that
accompanies it.
"People study
memory in infants, they study discrimination in emotional affect, but we are
the first ones to study how these emotions influence memory," said BYU
psychology professor Ross Flom, lead author of the study.
Although the
five-month-olds can't talk, there are a number of different ways that
researchers can analyze how the babies respond to testing treatments. In this
particular study, they monitored the infants' eye movements and how long they
look at a test image.
The babies were set in
front of a flat paneled monitor in a closed off partition and then exposed to a
person on screen speaking to them with either a happy, neutral or angry voice.
Immediately following the emotional exposure, they were shown a geometric
shape.
To test their memory,
the researchers did follow-up tests 5 minutes later and again one day later. In
the follow-up test, babies were shown two side-by-side geometric shapes: a
brand new one, and the original one from the study.
The researchers then
were able to record how many times the baby looked from one image to the next
and how long they spent looking at each image. Babies' memories didn't improve
if the shape had been paired with a negative voice, but they performed
significantly better at remembering shapes attached to positive voices.
"We think what
happens is that the positive affect heightens the babies' attentional system
and arousal," Flom said. "By heightening those systems, we heighten
their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern."
This paper was
co-authored with Professor Brock Kirwan as well undergraduate and masters
students Rebecca B. Janis and Darren J. Garcia. It follows a string of Flom's
significant research on infants' ability to understand each others' moods, the
moods of dogs, monkeys, and classical music.
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