Developmental changes in the interface between perception and memory retrieval.

Four experiments examined how perception affects delayed recognition, visual pop out, and memory reactivation (priming) at 6 mo. Infants discriminated cues (Ls, Ts, and +s) differing in spatial arrangement or number of primitive perceptual units (textons) or both in a delayed recognition task and exhibited adultlike visual pop-out effects in a priming task. Performance at 6 mo resembled that at 3 mo and adult preattentive processing. Unlike at 3 mo, however, at 6 mo, an expectancy-based process overrode the perceptual characteristics of a novel pop-out stimulus in a delayed recognition test. Results indicate that delayed recognition memory becomes more "top down" over the 1st half-year, whereas memory priming remains age invariant and perceptually driven. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)