Retrieval Order Variation in a Deferred Imitation Task: Assessment of Item-Relational Information Processing among Infants.

Item-Specific and Item-Relational Information Processing of Memory Material The interest in imitation for pure and applied research is so great because of its fundamental importance to basic processes in the process of socialization and cognitive development (i.e. language and memory development in particular). In terms of pure research, imitation paradigms provide researchers with an invaluable, nonverbal tool to explore the process of remembering over time or what is referred to as "declarative memory" development starting from 6-months of age. With clinical populations imitation serves both a diagnostic and therapeutic function. For example, using an imitation procedure Baer, Petersen, & Sherman. (1967) successfully established a large repertoire of new behaviors among severely to profoundly retarded children ages 9- through 12 years, who had previously displayed no imitative behavior. Subsequent to this the established readiness to imitate was utilized to create initial verbal repertoires in two of the subjects. The study by Baer et al. (1967) demonstrates, on the one hand, that imitation is an extremely effective learning mechanism even for special clinical populations based merely on an appropriate demonstration by a model. On the other hand, the study by Baer et al. (1967) points out nicely that an established predisposition to imitate behaviors can generalize to a new task. Whereas the study by Baer et al. (1967) demonstrates a generalization in the children's readiness to imitate in a new situation, another aspect of generalization with regard to the transfer of learned behaviors acquired through observation of a model to a new context has been of great interest in recent years in part because the flexibility of behavior learned in an imitation paradigm in one context to a new one is one hallmark characteristic of declarative memory (Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001). Thus, maintenance and generalization of learning is critical to what is cognitively referred to as "declarative" memory. Baddeley (1982) distinguished two types of context. Intrinsic context determines the mechanism of how a target item is encoded, so that changing the context during testing requires subjects to recognize something very different from what they originally encoded. An example of intrinsic context might be the sentence in which a target word was presented or the scene in which an image appears. Extrinsic context does not influence how a target item is encoded, but includes aspects of the background such as where the item was learned. Virtually all research with deferred imitation has focused on changes in extrinsic context including changes in testing location, location appearance, or social context (Hanna & Meltzoff, 1993; Learmonth, Lamberth, & Rovee-Collier, 2005; 2006). Only recently has there been research involving a manipulation of intrinsic context with a deferred imitation task, namely the alteration of retrieval order in order to study the specificity of infants' memory for the organization of test items in a sequence of modeled actions (Knopf, Kraus, & Kressley-Mba, 2006). Memory researchers have long been interested in how retention is affected by the organization of to-be-remembered materials. Organization refers to the specific relations among the elements embodied in a configuration (Puff, 1978). Such relations can be characterized by serial input position, for example, or by a meaningful relation between to-be-remembered items (Puff, 1978; Tulving, 1983). Hunt and Einstein (1981) suggest that at the cognitive level of understanding two types of information processing can be differentiated by the extent to which common features shared by separate events are encoded, namely item relational and item-specific processing. Hunt and Einstein (1981) describe relational information processing as the abstraction of relational information shared by the elements or events at input. …