Poster #6 - Eye-movement studies of relational memory in children and adults

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

The goal of the present research is to assess age-related differences in eye movements associated with memory in 4-year-old children. For Experiment 1, we had 4-year-old children and young adults perform a scene manipulation task modeled after Ryan and colleagues (2000). Eighteen 4-year-old children and 19 young adults incidentally encoded objects and scenes by making indoor/outdoor judgments. At retrieval, participants saw repeated scenes, manipulated scenes (scenes that either had a novel object added or removed), and completely novel scenes. Given the results of Ryan et al., (2000), we hypothesized that young adults, but not 4-year-olds would show greater fixations to manipulated relative to repeated and novel scenes. However, our data showed that both young adults and 4-year-old children fixated longer and more on manipulated than repeated and novel scenes (Figure 1). Further, the effect in both age groups was driven by the addition scenes (Figure 2). This finding suggested that this version of the task was likely supported by item, rather than relational memory, which was the primary construct of interest. For Experiment 2, we created the manipulated scenes by rearranging items and backgrounds. For example, participants encode a coffee maker in the first kitchen scene, a mixer in a second kitchen scene, and a cookie jar in the third kitchen scene. At retrieval, a repeated trial would present the coffee maker in the first kitchen and a manipulated trial would present the mixer in the third scene. All objects are presented in the same location of the scene so greater and longer fixations to the region of interest for manipulated relative to repeated scenes would only occur if relational memory for the item-background pair is intact. Preliminary data from young adults suggests that they fixate more and longer on the manipulated scenes relative to the repeated scenes. Therefore, eye movements continue to index relational memory on this version of the task, which is more demanding on relational memory. Data collection with 4-year-old for Experiment 2 children is ongoing.

Authors

• Leslie Rollins, Christopher Newport University
  Presenting Author

• Alexandra Green, Christopher Newport University
  Non-Presenting Author