The Emergence of Declarative Memory

The Emergence of Declarative Memory

Markas Brunson

The Emergence of Declarative Memory

The following is a summary and evaluation on the research article, The Development of Declarative Memory in Human Infants: Age-Related Changes in Deferred Imitation. The article is based on experiments performed to resolve the issue of the approximate time when declarative memory begins to form and the effect of age has on declarative memory; this experiment was lead by Harlene Hayne, Joanne Boniface, and Rachel Barr, all of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. A chief indicator of the achievement of declarative memory is the success of imitation. The use of infants of different age ranges was vital to the study; the infants used were 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months.

To correctly test the declarative memory, the researcher used deferred imitation tasks with the infants. In the first experiment 60 infants were used that were 12 months and 60 infants were used to that were 18 months. Two hand puppets were used, a pink rabbit and a grey mouse; both were about 30 centimeters