How Infants Learn and Remember

             Infants learn, and ultimately remember, in variety of ways. Our text refers to the methods of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, attention, imitation, and memory and concept formation. Each of these methods offers a different way for children to learn and for parents to enhance their children’s learning.

            Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, discovered classical conditioning. In classical conditioning, a neutral stimulus acquires the ability to produce a response originally produced by another stimulus. Our text relates several examples of this method. A way to relate this to parents and children is using a lullaby at bed time. A mother wants to get her child on a bedtime schedule. In an effort to do this, she begins to sing a lullaby to her child at bedtime. The infant learns that after the lullaby, his mother will lay him down. The child begins to associate bedtime with this lullaby and settles down right after the lullaby.

            B.F. Skinner introduced the concept of operant conditioning. In operant conditioning, the consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior’s occurrence. For example, a mother wants to condition her infant to help clean up their toys. Each time the infant helps clean their toys up, the mother positively rewards the infant with praise. After awhile, the infant will be “conditioned” to clean up their toys based on the positive praise.

            A third method is attention. Attention refers to the focusing of mental resources on select information. Attention includes the processes of habituation and dishabituation. Habituation is the decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus. Dishabituation is the increased responsiveness after a change in stimulation. Also included in attention is joint attention, where individuals focus on the same object or event. According to our text, infants’ attention is strongly governed by novelty and habituation. (Santrock, 2010) In an effort to teach their child about objects, a parent points to objects while naming them to get their child to focus on them.

            Imitation is where children imitate behaviors seen in their role models. Andrew Meltzoff concluded that infants do not blindly imitate everything they see and often make creative errors. (Santrock, 2010) Deferred imitation is imitation that occurs after a delay of hours or days. According to a study conducted in Germany, infants between the ages of 11 months and 12 months could imitate five actions they saw the researchers perform. (Goertz, Kolling, Frahsek, Stanisch, & Knopf, 2008) A parent can use imitation as a tool to teach their infants to help clean up. The parent picks up a toy and puts it away. The parent then claps to show that the behavior is acceptable. The infant can then imitate the behavior.

            Memory involves the retention of information over a period of time. There are two types of behavior, implicit and explicit. Implicit memory is memory without conscious recollection. It involves skills and routine procedures that are automatically performed. Explicit memory is conscious memory of facts and experiences. An infant remembers the positive reward from the operant conditioning example earlier. Therefore, the child will more than likely repeat the behavior again.

            Concept formation is the organization of information into categories. An infant is shown picture cards of birds and groups them together realizing they are the same. He then realizes that an airplane can be grouped with the birds as well because they all fly.

A parent can use concept formation to enhance their child’s learning.

Works Cited

Goertz, C., Kolling, T., Frahsek, S., Stanisch, A., & Knopf, M. (2008). Assessing declarative memory in 12-month-old infants: A test - retest reliability study of the deferred imitation task. European Journal Of Developmental Psychology , 492-506.

Santrock, J. W. (2010). Children. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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