Decreases in the response latency to priming over the first year of life.
We previously reported that the latency of responding to a memory prime in a reactivation procedure decreases between 3 and 6 months of age. The present study extended this analysis through the first year of life. In this study, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds learned an operant task. One week after they had forgotten it, infants were exposed to a component of the original event as a memory prime and were tested after different delays for evidence of retention. Although the interval between the original event and priming increased linearly with age-from 3 weeks at 6 months to 9 weeks at 12 months, the latency of responding after priming decreased linearly with age-from 1 hr at 6 months to 0-1 s at 12 months. The latency of responding after priming was not task-specific; at 6 months, it was identical in two different tasks. These results provide additional evidence that priming in reactivation studies with infants is the same automatic, perceptual identification phenomenon as repetition priming in studies with adults.