Professor Harlene Hayne
 Contact
Details
Email hayne@psy.otago.ac.nz
Link to published PDF
papers
Development of Learning and Memory in Infants and Young
Children
The term infantile amnesia refers to the inability of children
and adults to remember events that occurred during their infancy
and early childhood. When adults attempt to recall their personal
experiences for example, they remember virtually nothing about
events occurring prior to the age of 3 or 4. The phenomenon
of infantile amnesia raises a number of important questions
about the characteristics of memory processing during early
life.
The goal of my research programme is to document memory
development from infancy through early childhood. In particular,
I am interested in how encoding, storage, and retrieval processes
change as a function of age and experience, how the acquisition
of language influences memory ability, and how changes in
test procedures alter our estimates of memory development.
To address these issues, I examine learning and memory
in infants and young children. Recent studies in my laboratory
have explored the effects of contextual cues on memory
retrieval by infants and toddlers, the effects of repeated
retrieval on long-term retention, and the effects of new information
on previously established memories. Taken together, the results
of these studies have demonstrated that early experiences
can, under certain circumstances, have a long-lasting impact
on behaviour.
Hayne, H. (2004). Infant memory development: Implications
for childhood amnesia. Developmental Review, 24,
33-73.
Hayne, H., Boniface, J., & Barr, R. F. (2000). The development
of declarative memory in human infants: Age-related changes
in deferred imitation. Behavioral Neuroscience, 114(1),
77-83.
Hayne, H., Gross, J., Hildreth, K., & Rovee-Collier, C.
(2000). Repeated reminders increase the speed of memory retrieval
by 3-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 3(3),
312-318.
Simcock, G., & Hayne, H. (2002). Breaking the barrier?
Children fail to translate their preverbal memories into language.
Psychological Science, 13(3), 225-231.
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