Short Term Memory Study

Capacity of Short Term Memory During Infancy
What’s the earliest memory possible? This is a question that psychologist have intensely studied for the past several decades (Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003, p.1808). Many of these studies have used a novelty preference procedure, which measures memory by using a novel stimulus and a familiarized stimulus. A novel stimulus would only be recognized and therefore favored if the previous one is still in STM. Studies using this procedure have provided a foundation for the emergence of memory in infancy, as well as its capacity. For instance, some reports have shown that infants only a few hours old can recall a visual stimulus; older infants remember encoded information for hours or even several days (Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003, p.1808). Recently, Ross-Sheehy and Newman have developed a preference procedure with which to test infant visual STM, as well as one to test the grounds behind forgetting patterns for auditory STM in infancy (Ross-Sheehy & Newman 2013). Both tasks could be extended, to test forgetting patterns in visual STM and linguistic auditory memory. …show more content…
Oakes, and Steven J. Luck’s (2003), visual task in, “The Development of Visual Short-Term Memory Capacity in Infants”. Ross-Sheehy, and colleagues designed a series of experiments to test short-term memory in infancy through the developmental stages of 4 months of age to 13 months. The task entailed comparing looking times to changing and non- changing visual stimulus streams. Each stream contained 1 to 6 colored squares. The changing streams randomly changed color and the non-changing streams stayed the same. They hypothesized that infants would look longer at changing streams, only if they could remember the previous ones and keep those in STM, to compare with the novel ones (Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003,