Jennifer A. Schwade

General cognitive principles for learning structure in time and space

How are hierarchically structured sequences of objects, events or actions learned from experience and represented in the brain? When several streams of regularities present themselves, which will be learned and which ignored? Can statistical regularities take effect on their own, or are additional factors such as behavioral outcomes expected to influence statistical learning? Answers to these questions are starting to emerge through a convergence of findings from naturalistic observations, behavioral experiments, neurobiological studies, and computational analyses and simulations. We propose that a small set of principles are at work in every situation that involves learning of structure from patterns of experience and outline a general framework that accounts for such learning.

Finding the right fit: examining developmentally appropriate levels of challenge in elicited-imitation studies.

Publisher Summary Over the past two decades, elicited and deferred imitation have emerged as widely used paradigms for the assessment of developmental changes in childrens memory abilities. To be implemented effectively, the use of elicited imitation begins with the selection of to-be-remembered material that presents an appropriate level of challenge to the developmental abilities of the participating children. This has been implicit in the use of imitation in which older children are presented with longer sequences than younger children. This chapter presents results from two studies examining the abilities of 16- to 32-month-old children to recall event sequences of a variety of lengths in an elicited-imitation paradigm. The results provide normative information on age-related immediate imitation abilities; and it can serve as a guide for the researchers who plan to use elicited imitation with special populations or use elicited imitation as a tool to study memorys relation to other developmental domains, by establishing developmentally appropriate materials to test children across the second and third years of life.

Hearing the signal through the noise: Assessing the stability of individual differences in declarative memory in the second and third years of life

Publisher Summary Attention to variability in early declarative memory is not only important in its own right but also an essential component in the examination of relations among individual differences in early memory and other individual characteristics such as temperament and language. Although less attention has been paid to them, relative to the attention paid to mean or group level trends, there also are individual differences in early declarative memory. Early in development, when declarative memory is newly emergent, individual differences are apparent in whether children show evidence of memory.