UC Davis

Previous visual short-term memory research has shown that infants can store visual information in (VSTM) and that the amount of information infants can store changes across development. Recently, there has been a shift toward understanding how infants store information in VSTM. We tested 5- to 12-month-old infants (N = 57, 31 girls) from the Greater Sacramento area of California, USA, in an eye-tracking change localization task. Infants saw trials with the following sequence: a 500-ms sample array of three or four (set sizes) colored circles, followed by a 300-ms delay array with a blank screen, and finally a 2000-ms test array in which one circle chosen at random changes color. At both set sizes (3 and 4), infants successfully localized the change and preferred the changed item more than chance. Moreover, we found that when infants fixated the to-be-changed item prior to the change onset, they showed a stronger preference for the changed item during the test array compared to when they did not fixate the to-be-changed item. These results add to our growing understanding of the development of VSTM in infancy, and demonstrate the importance of infants’ attention on their encoding of information in VSTM and in this task their localization of the change in the test array.