Using imitation to study long-term recall in infancy

Abstract

Significant advances have been made in our collective understanding of cognitive development more broadly, and recall in particular, over the past 25 years. Whereas early work established the conditions under which recall was apparent in the first years of life, more recent studies focus on social ecological factors that may promote or hinder recall. In this review paper, we first describe the elicited or deferred imitation paradigm and its variants. We then report on well-established experimental factors that impact long-term recall performance, including child age, sequence constraints, encoding manipulations, and the adult-provided supportive language in imitation tasks. We also discuss more recently identified contextual correlates, including infant language exposure and comprehension. We conclude with future directions, highlighting additional work needed on currently understudied contextual correlates of long-term recall, including sleep and cross-cultural variability in recall performance, along with providing recommendations to establish remote administration and scoring procedures that could be used by large-scale research collaboratives to further our understanding of cognitive development not only in small samples, but in infants around the world.