Learning and Memory: Conditioning, Infant Memory, Strategies, and Aging
This domain covers how organisms acquire associations, how memory is measured in preverbal infants, how memory strategies develop, and which memory systems decline in late adulthood.
Conditioning and observational learning
- Classical: Pavlov's dogs; Watson and Rayner's Little Albert (white rat paired with a loud noise produced fear that generalized to a rabbit and a fur coat - also a classic ethics case). Conditioned taste aversion (Garcia) is acquired in one trial, tolerates long delays, and is biologically prepared.
- Operant: reinforcement increases and punishment decreases behavior; negative reinforcement is not punishment - it removes an aversive state. Variable-ratio schedules produce the most persistent responding. Extinction produces spontaneous recovery.
- Observational (Bandura's Bobo doll): children imitate aggression, especially when the model is reinforced - vicarious reinforcement.
Infant memory paradigms
- Conjugate reinforcement (Rovee-Collier): 2–3-month-olds kick to move a ribbon-tied mobile; kick rate rises. Retention is short early (a day or two at 2–3 months, weeks by 6 months) and can be reactivated by a brief reminder, showing memory is retrieval-dependent rather than absent.
- Deferred imitation (Meltzoff) appears by roughly 9 months with delays of hours to a day, and earlier with short delays.
- Infantile amnesia: adults' earliest autobiographical memories date to about age 3–4. Explanations include hippocampal immaturity, absence of a verbal self-narrative, and source-monitoring limits. Procedural learning is not wiped out.
Strategy development
Rehearsal emerges around age 7, followed by organization and elaboration; metamemory improves alongside. A larger knowledge base boosts recall even when capacity is fixed (chess experts remember chess positions). Working-memory capacity grows through childhood to roughly four chunks in adults (Cowan).
Aging
Episodic and source memory decline; semantic memory, procedural skill, and emotional memory hold up better. Slowing and reduced inhibitory control (Hasher & Zacks) impair encoding and retrieval; recognition is better preserved than free recall. Older adults benefit from compensatory strategies and environmental support, and stereotype threat can depress test performance.
Worked example
A 3-month-old trained in the mobile task does not kick when tested a week later. Reasoning: at 3 months, retention after a single session is only a few days, so the drop is expected forgetting rather than failure to learn. A brief reminder session reinstates the kicking, demonstrating retrieval failure. Concluding the infant 'never learned' would misread the paradigm.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling habituation 'boredom.'
- Assuming infantile amnesia covers all memory rather than explicit autobiographical memory.
- Confusing negative reinforcement with punishment, or punishment with extinction.
- Assuming all memory declines uniformly with age.