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Biomedical subjects

Patricia J Bauer

Publications and source records attributed to Patricia J Bauer.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Explicit memory performance in infants of diabetic mothers at 1 year of age.

The aim of the present research was to investigate the impact of abnormal fetal environment on explicit memory performance. Based on animal models, it was hypothesized that infants of diabetic mothers (IDMs) experience perturbations in memory performance due to exposure to multiple neurologic risk factors including: chronic hypoxia, hyperglycemia/reactive hypoglycemia, and iron deficiency. Memory performance, as measured by the elicited/deferred imitation paradigm, was compared between 13 IDMs (seven females, six males; mean age 365 days, SD 11) and 16 typically developing children (seven females, nine males; mean age 379 days, SD 9). The IDM group was characterized by shorter gestational age (mean 38w, SD 2), greater standardized birthweight scores (mean 3797g, SD 947), and lower iron stores (mean ferritin concentration 87C microg/L, SD 68) in comparison with the control group (mean gestational age: 40w, SD 1; mean birthweight: 3639g, SD 348; mean newborn ferritin concentration 140 microg/L, SD 46). After statistically controlling for both gestational age and global cognitive abilities, IDMs demonstrated a deficit in the ability to recall multi-step event sequences after a delay was imposed. These findings highlight the importance of the prenatal environment on subsequent mnemonic behavior and suggest a connection between metabolic abnormalities during the prenatal period, development of memory, circuitry, and behavioral mnemonic performance.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

A longitudinal study of gendered vocabulary and communicative action in young children.

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et al., 1994). At 24 to 36 months, girls' and boys' productive vocabularies contained more same-gender-typed words than other-gender-typed words. Receptive vocabulary gender-differential effects were apparent among boys at 18 months. At 13 and 18 months, gender-typed differences were apparent in communicative actions. The research reveals the utility of unobtrusive, nonexperimental measures for assessing gender-related knowledge and behavior in young children.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2005

Construction of a more coherent story: prior verbal recall predicts later verbal accessibility of early memories.

The question of whether early event memories are later accessible for verbal report is of major interest to those concerned with mnemonic processes. In a controlled laboratory study, we examined this question in children 16 and 20 months of age at the time of exposure to event sequences in the context of an elicited-imitation paradigm and who were subsequently tested for memory for the events at delays of 1, 3, 6, 9, or 12 months, and again at the age of 36 months. Stepwise regressions revealed that the number of mnemonic utterances elicited by direct interview at 36 months is predicted by the number of spontaneous mnemonic utterances at the first delayed recall session. Language abilities at exposure were not predictive of verbal report at 36 months of age. Thus, variables from the most recent exposure were of more import than were variables from the time of the initial experience of the events.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2005

Autobiographical memory in middle childhood: recollections of the recent and distant past.

To address the question of whether memories from early childhood survive into later childhood, participants visited the laboratory at age 3 and again at 7, 8, or 9. At age 3, each talked with a parent about six events; at the later age each child talked with a researcher about four of these distant events as well as two more recent events. School-aged children recalled fewer than half of the distant events introduced. Further, the proportion of distant events recalled was negatively correlated with age. Those distant events that were recalled, however, were recounted in an accurate, detailed manner. Importantly, reports of distant events did not reflect the full extent of children's narrative ability. Reports of recent events were more coherent and included twice the detail. Implications for existing interpretations of autobiographical memory and childhood amnesia are discussed, and the need for further research employing innovative methods is emphasised.

Aging↗
PubMed2005

Developments in declarative memory.

The second year of life is marked by changes in the robustness of recall memory. Both retrieval and storage processes have been implicated as the major source of age-related improvements in recall. Children 13 to 20 months of age were matched for levels of learning of laboratory events (thereby eliminating encoding as a source of developmental difference) and tested for recall after delays as long as 6 months. In Experiment 1, 16-month-olds evidenced less loss of information and more relearning than 13-month-olds. In Experiment 2, 20-month-olds evidenced less loss of information and more relearning than 16-month-olds. Patterns of performance across test trials and in relearning implicate a decline in susceptibility to storage failure as the primary source of the observed developmental trend.

Child Development↗
PubMed2005

Forming a stable memory representation in the first year of life: why imitation is more than child's play.

Although 9-month-old infants are capable of retaining temporally ordered information over long delays, this ability is relatively fragile. It may be possible to facilitate long-term retention by allowing infants to imitate event sequences immediately after their presentation. The effects of imitation on immediate and delayed recognition and on long-term recall were investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) and elicited imitation, respectively. Mnemonic facilitation resulting from the opportunity to imitate was apparent using both assessments. ERP assessments at immediate and delayed recognition tests suggested that infants who were allowed to imitate had stronger memory representations of familiar stimuli relative to infants who only viewed the presentation of the events. In addition, infants who were allowed to imitate evidenced higher levels of ordered recall after 1 month relative to infants who only watched the experimenter's demonstration. Therefore, imitation proved to have beneficial effects on explicit memory in 9(1/2)-month-olds, providing evidence of its effectiveness as a tool to augment mnemonic capabilities in infancy.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2004

Understanding the emotional past: relations between parent and child contributions in emotionally negative and nonnegative events.

The past event conversations of 33 mothers with their 3-year-old children (18 girls and 15 boys) were selected from a larger sample based on their discussion of negative events. Negative events included both those that were negative in topic and those that contained negative incidents but were otherwise positively themed. Within-subjects comparisons were made between the negative events and a neutral or positive event. There were few differences in how mothers and their children talked about negative and nonnegative events. Children did include more interpretations (internal state and causal references) in their negative event conversations. For both event types, mothers who talked more about the past events had children who reported more. When maternal talkativeness was controlled, involving children in the negative event conversations through deflecting the conversational turn predicted children's total contributions and number of interpretations. Repeating information and requests for information while constraining the topic was negatively related to the number of details children reported for nonnegative past events. Conversations about minor negative experiences demonstrate that mothers can influence children's involvement in discussions and understanding of the past.

Child Language↗
PubMed2003

After the storm: enduring differences in mother-child recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic events.

Despite a growing literature on the collaborative reminiscing of mothers and children, little is known about the kinds of things mothers and children discuss as they recollect shared traumatic experiences. Do mother-child recollections of a traumatic event differ from their recollections of more benign events? To address this question, mother-child dyads (N=29) discussed a traumatic event, namely a devastating tornado, and two nontraumatic events (one that preceded and one that followed the tornado). Each dyad discussed all three events 4-months post-tornado and again 6 months later. Whereas conversations about both event types (traumatic and nontraumatic) varied with children's age, dyads' recollections of the tornado were significantly longer, more narratively coherent, and more complete than their recollections of nontraumatic events. These differences largely endured over the 6-month retention interval.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Developments in long-term explicit memory late in the first year of life: behavioral and electrophysiological indices.

Coincident with developments in the temporal-cortical explicit memory network, long-term recall abilities are newly emergent late in the first year of human life. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 9-month-olds as an index of the integrity of the neural substrate underlying a task thought to reflect explicit memory, namely, deferred imitation. ERP measures of recognition memory 1 week after unique laboratory experiences predicted whether and how much infants recalled of the experiences 1 month later. The findings further imply that memory storage and consolidation processes are a major source of variability in long-term recall memory late in the first year of life.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2003

Representation of the inner self in autobiography: women's and men's use of internal states language in personal narratives.

Adult women and men differ in the affective qualities of their autobiographical reports. In the present study, we tested whether gender differences in emotional content are apparent in memories of both the remote past and the recent past, as well as whether they extend to internal states other than emotion. A total of 48 women and 30 men provided written accounts of four events from early in life (events from before age 7) and four events from later in life (events from age 7 or later). The narratives were coded for mention of emotions, cognitions, perceptions, and physiological states. Women used more emotion terms in their descriptions of events from later in life, relative to men; across life phases, similar trends were observed for cognition and perception terms, but not for physiological states terms. The category of internal states terms was found to be more coherent for women than for men. Results are consistent with suggestions that females and males experience differential socialisation regarding expression of internal states.

Adult↗