Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T03:16:20.426Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Memory and representation in young children with Down syndrome: Exploring deferred imitation and object permanence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2009

Mechthild Rast  and
Andrew N. Meltzoff
Mechthild Rast
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Andrew N. Meltzoff*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
*
Andrew N. Meltzoff, Department of Psychology, Box 357920, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-7920.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Deferred imitation and object permanence (OP) were tested in 48 young children with Down syndrome (DS), ranging from 20 to 43 months of age. Deferred imitation and high-level OP (invisible displacements) have long been held to be synchronous developments during sensory-motor “Stage 6” (18–24 months of age in unimpaired children). The results of the current study demonstrate deferred imitation in young children with DS, showing they can learn novel behaviors from observation and retain multiple models in memory. This is the first demonstration of deferred imitation in young children with DS. The average OP level passed in this sample was A-not-B, a task passed at 8–12 months of age in normally developing infants. Analyses showed that individual children who failed high-level OP (invisible displacements) could still perform deferred imitation. This indicates that deferred imitation and OP invisible displacements are not synchronous developments in children with DS. This asynchrony is compatible with new data from unimpaired children suggesting that deferred imitation and high-level OP entail separate and distinctive kinds of memory and representation

Type
Articles
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Summer 1995 , pp. 393 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahamsen, A., Cavallo, M. M., & McCluer, J. A. (1985). Is the sign advantage a robust phenomenon? From gesture to language in two modalities. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 31, 177–209.Google Scholar
Astington, J. W., & Gopnik, A. (1991). Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 7–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E., & Snyder, L. (1987). The cognitive hypothesis in language development. In Uzgiris, I. C. & Hunt, J. M. (Eds.), Infant performance and experience: New findings with the ordinal scales (pp. 168–204). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Bauer, P. J., & Hertsgaard, L. A. (1993). Increasing steps in recall of events: Factors facilitating immediate and long-term memory in 13.5- and 16.5- month-old children. Child Development, 64, 1204–1223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beeghly, M., & Cicchetti, D. (1987). An organizational approach to symbolic development in children with Down syndrome. In Cicchetti, D. & Beeghly, M. (Eds.), Symbolic development in atypical children (pp. 5–29). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Beeghly, M., Weiss-Perry, B., & Cicchetti, D. (1989). Structural and affective dimensions of play development in young children with Down syndrome. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 12, 257–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beeghly, M., Weiss-Perry, B., & Cicchetti, D. (1990). Beyond sensorimotor functioning: Early communicative and play development of children with Down syndrome. In Cicchetti, D. & Beeghly, M. (Eds.), Children with Down syndrome: A developmental perspective (pp. 329–368). New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butterworth, G. E. (1977). Object disappearance and error in Piaget's stage IV task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 23, 391–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butterworth, G., Jarrett, N., & Hicks, L. (1982). Spatiotemporal identity in infancy: Perceptual competence or conceptual deficit? Developmental Psychology, 18, 435–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardoso-Martins, C., Mervis, C. B., & Mervis, C. A. (1985). Early vocabulary acquisition by children with Down syndrome. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 90, 177–184.Google ScholarPubMed
Charman, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1994). Another look at imitation in autism. Development and Psychopathology, 6, 403–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cicchetti, D., & Mans-Wagener, L. (1987). Sequences, stages, and structures in the organization of cognitive development in infants with Down syndrome. In Uzgiris, I. C. & Hunt, J. M. (Eds.), Infant performance and experience: New findings with the ordinal scales (pp. 281–310). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Cornwell, A., & Birch, H. (1969). Psychological and social development in home-reared children with Down's syndrome. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 74, 341–350.Google ScholarPubMed
Curcio, F., & Houlihan, J. (1987). Varieties of organization between domains of sensorimotor intelligence in normal and atypical populations. In Uzgiris, I. C. & Hunt, J. M. (Eds.), Infant performance and experience: New findings with the ordinal scales (pp. 98–130). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Diamond, A. (1985). Development of the ability to use recall to guide action, as indicated by infants' performance on A. Child Development, 56, 868–883.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunst, C. J. (1981). Test settings and the sensorimotor performance of infants with Down's syndrome. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 53, 575–578.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunst, C. J. (1988). Stage transitioning in the sensorimotor development of Down's syndrome infants. Journal of Mental Deficiency Research, 32, 405–410.Google ScholarPubMed
Dunst, C. J. (1990). Sensorimotor development of infants with Down syndrome. In Cicchetti, D. & Beeghly, M. (Eds.), Children with Down syndrome: A developmental perspective (pp. 180–230). New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunst, C. J., & Rheingrover, R. M. (1983). Structural characteristics of sensorimotor development among Down's syndrome infants. Journal of Mental Deficiency Research, 27, 11–22.Google ScholarPubMed
Dykens, E. M., Hodapp, R. M., & Evans, D. W. (1994). Profiles and development of adaptive behavior in children with Down syndrome. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 98, 580–587.Google ScholarPubMed
Fischer, K. W., & Bidell, T. (1991). Constraining nativist inferences about cognitive capacities. In Carey, S. & Gelman, R. (Eds.), The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition (pp. 199–235). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Flavell, J. (1982). On cognitive development. Child Development, 53, 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, N., Kagan, J., & Weiskopf, S. (1979). The growth of memory during infancy. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 99, 91–130.Google ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1986). Relations between semantic and cognitive development in the one-word stage: The specificity hypothesis. Child Development, 57, 1040–1053.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1987). The development of categorization in the second year and its relation to other cognitive and linguistic developments. Child Development, 58, 1523–1531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1992). Categorization and naming: Basic-level sorting in eighteen-month-olds and its relation to language. Child Development. 63, 1091–1103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanna, E., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1993). Peer imitation by toddlers in laboratory, home, and day-care contexts: Implications for social learning and memory. Developmental Psychology, 29, 701–710.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, P. L. (1987). The development of search. In Salapatek, P. & Cohen, L. (Eds.), Handbook of infant perception (Vol. 2, pp. 155–207). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Heimann, M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (in press). Deferred imitation in 9- and 14-month-old infants: A longitudinal study of a Swedish sample. British Journal of Developmental Psychology.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, P. M., & McCune-Nicolich, L. (1981). Pretend play and patterns of cognition in Down's syndrome children. Child Development, 52, 611–617.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hirschfeld, L. A., & Gelman, S. A. (1994). Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollingshead, A. B. (1975). Four factor index of social status. Unpublished manuscript. Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Kahn, J. V. (1978). Acceleration of object permanence with severely and profoundly retarded children. American Association for the Education of the Severely/Profoundly Handicapped Review, 3, 15–22.Google Scholar
Krakow, J. B., & Kopp, C. B. (1983). The effects of developmental delay on sustained attention in young children. Child Development, 54, 1143–1155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loveland, K. A., & Kelley, M. L. (1991). Development of adaptive behavior in preschoolers with autism or Down syndrome. American Journal on Mental Retardation. 96, 13–20.Google ScholarPubMed
Mandler, J. M. (1990). Recall of events of preverbal children. In A. Diamond (Ed.), The development and neural bases of higher cognitive functions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 608, 485–516.Google Scholar
Meltzoff, A. N. (1985). Immediate and deferred imitation in fourteen- and twenty-four-month old infants. Child Development, 56, 62–72.Google Scholar
Meltzoff, A. N. (1988a). Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: Long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Developmental Psychology, 24 470–476.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. N. (1988b). Infant imitation and memory: Nine-month-olds in immediate and deferred tests. Child Development, 59, 217–225.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. N. (1990). Towards a developmental cognitive science: The implications of cross-modal matching and imitation for the development of representation and memory in infancy. In A. Diamond (Ed.), The development and neural bases of higher cognitive functions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 608, 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meltzoff, A. N. (1995). What infant memory tells about infantile amnesia: Long-term recall and deferred imitation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 59. 497–515.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. N. (1995). Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Developmental Psychology, 31 (5).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. N., & Gopnik, A. (1989). On linking nonverbal imitation, representation, and language learning in the first two years of life. In Speidel, G. E. & Nelson, K. E. (Eds.), The many faces of imitation in language learning (pp. 23–51). New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meltzoff, A. N., & Gopnik, A. (1993). The role of imitation in understanding persons and developing a theory of mind. In Baron-Cohen, S., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Cohen, D. (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from autism (pp. 335–366). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1994). Imitation, memory, and the representation of persons. Infant Behavior and Development, 17, 83–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1995). Infants' understanding of people and things: From body imitation to folk psychology. In Bermiidez, J., Marcel, A. J., & Eilan, N. (Eds.), The body and the self (pp. 43–69). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mervis, C. B., & Cardoso-Martins, C. (1984). Transition from sensorimotor stage 5 to stage 6 by Down syndrome children: A response to Gibson. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 89, 99–102.Google ScholarPubMed
Miller, J. F. (1992). Development of speech and language in children with Down syndrome. In Lott, I. T. & McCoy, E. E. (Eds.), Down Syndrome: Advances in Medical Care (pp. 39–50). New York: Wiley-Liss.Google Scholar
Moore, M. K. (1975, 04). Object permanence and object identity: A stage-developmental model. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.Google Scholar
Moore, M. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1978). Object permanence, imitation, and language development in infancy: Toward a neo-Piagetian perspective on communicative and cognitive development. In Minifie, F. D. & Lloyd, L. L. (Eds.), Communicative and cognitive abilities—Early behavioral assessment (pp. 151–184). Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Morss, J. R. (1983). Cognitive development in the Down's syndrome infant: Slow or different? British Journal of Educational Psychology, 53, 40–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morss, J. R. (1984). Enhancement of object-permanence performance in the Down's syndrome infant. Child: care, health and development, 10, 39–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Motti, F., Cicchetti, D., & Sroufe, A. L. (1983). From infant affect expression to symbolic play: The coherence of development in Down syndrome children. Child Development, 54, 1168–1175.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mundy, P., Sigman, M., Kasari, C., & Yirmiya, N. (1988). Nonverbal communication skills in Down syndrome children. Child Development, 59, 235–249.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pasnak, C. F., & Pasnak, R. (1987). Accelerated development of object permanence in Down's syndrome infants. Child: care, health and development, 13, 247–255.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York: International Universities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Rogers, S. J., McEvoy, R., Pennington, B. F., & Bennetto, L. (1995). Imitation and pantomime in high functioning persons with autism. Unpublished manuscript, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, CO.Google Scholar
Rogers, S. J., & Pennington, B. F. (1991). A theoretical approach to the deficits in infantile autism. Development and Psychopathology, 3, 137–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruskin, E. M., Mundy, P., Kasari, C., & Sigman, M. (1994). Object mastery motivation of children with Down syndrome. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 98, 499–509.Google ScholarPubMed
Sigman, M., & Ungerer, J. A. (1984). Cognitive and language skills in autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children. Developmental Psychology, 20, 293–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinson, J. C., & Wetherick, N. E. (1986). Integrating young children with Down's syndrome. Gaze, play and vocalisation in the initial encounter. British Journal of Mental Subnormality, 32, 93–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloper, P., Glenn, S. M., & Cunningham, C. C. (1986). The effect of intensity of training on sensori-motor development in infants with Down's syndrome. Journal of Mental Deficiency Research, 30, 149–162.Google ScholarPubMed
Uzgiris, I. C. (1987). The study of sequential order in cognitive development. In Uzgiris, I. C. & Hunt, J. M. (Eds.), Infant performance and experience: New findings with the ordinal scales (pp. 131–167). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Uzgiris, I. C., & Hunt, J. M. (1975). Assessment in infancy: Ordinal scales of psychological development. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66, 297–333.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wishart, J. G. (1986). The effects of step-by-step training on cognitive performance in infants with Down's syndrome. Journal of Mental Deficiency Research, 30, 233–250.Google ScholarPubMed
Wishart, J. G. (1987). Performance of young nonretarded children and children with Down syndrome on Piagetian infant search tasks. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 92, 169–177.Google ScholarPubMed
Wishart, J. G. (1988). Early learning in infants and young children with Down syndrome. In Nadel, L. (Ed.), The psychobiology of Down syndrome (pp. 1–50). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wishart, J. G. (1993). The development of learning difficulties in children with Down's syndrome. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 37, 389–403.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wishart, J. G., & Bower, T. G. R. (1984). Spatial relations and the object concept: A normative study. In Lipsitt, L. P. & Rovee-Collier, C. (Eds.), Advances in infancy research (Vol. 3, pp. 57–123). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Wishart, J. G., & Duffy, L. (1990). Instability of performance on cognitive tests in infants and young children with Down's syndrome. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 60, 10–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zigler, E. (1969). Developmental versus difference theories of mental retardation and the problem of motivation. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 73, 536–556.Google ScholarPubMed