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Research Article

Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants

Jennifer M. D. Yoon, Mark H. Johnson, and Gergely Csibra
  1. Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom

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PNAS September 9, 2008 105 (36) 13690-13695; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0804388105
Jennifer M. D. Yoon
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  • For correspondence: jennifer.yoon@stanford.edu
Mark H. Johnson
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Gergely Csibra
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  1. Edited by Susan E. Carey, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved July 21, 2008 (received for review May 6, 2008)

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Abstract

Human teaching, a highly specialized form of cooperative information transmission, depends not only on the presence of benevolent communicators in the environment, but also on the preparedness of the students to learn from communication when it is addressed to them. We tested whether 9-month-old human infants can distinguish between communicative and noncommunicative social contexts and whether they retain qualitatively different information about novel objects in these contexts. We found that in a communicative context, infants devoted their limited memory resources to encoding the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which is preferentially retained in noncommunicative contexts. We propose that infants' sensitivity to, and interpretation of, the social cues distinguishing infant-directed communication events represent important mechanisms of social learning by which others can help determine what information even preverbal human observers retain in memory.

  • cognitive development
  • cultural transmission
  • social learning
  • visual short-term memory

Footnotes

  • *To whom correspondence should be addressed at the present address:
    Department of Psychology, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA.
    E-mail: jennifer.yoon{at}stanford.edu
  • Author contributions: J.M.D.Y., M.H.J., and G.C. designed research; J.M.D.Y. performed research; J.M.D.Y. analyzed data; and J.M.D.Y., M.H.J., and G.C. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0804388105/DCSupplemental.

  • © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
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Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants
Jennifer M. D. Yoon, Mark H. Johnson, Gergely Csibra
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2008, 105 (36) 13690-13695; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804388105

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Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants
Jennifer M. D. Yoon, Mark H. Johnson, Gergely Csibra
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2008, 105 (36) 13690-13695; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804388105
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