A comparison of children's performance on two recognition memory tasks: Delayed nonmatch-to-sample versus visual paired-comparison

✍ Scribed by Dr. William H. Overman; Jocelyne Bachevalier; Frank Sewell; Jana Drew

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 922 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0012-1630
• DOI: 10.1002/dev.420260605

✦ Synopsis

Although 4-to 6-month-old children have a significant tendency to look at new stimuli in a visual paired-comparison task (VPC), they have difficulty in consistently choosing novel objects in a delayed nonmatch-to-sample task (DNMS). To evaluate which factors could account for this difficulty, we tested human infants (10-107 months) and adults (17-25 years) in a DNMS task while monitoring eye fixations. The results indicated that children at all ages reliably looked at (VPC scores) or chose (DNMS scores) the new stimuli about 60% of the time, indicating that both tasks measure visual recognition memory. A videotape analysis of visual attention revealed that children younger than 22