Developmental changes in infants’ visual short-term memory for location

To examine the development of visual short-term memory (VSTM) for location, we presented 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 199) with two side-by-side stimulus streams. In each stream, arrays of colored circles continually appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. In the changing stream, the location of one or more items changed in each cycle; in the non-changing streams the locations did not change. Eight- and 12.5-month-old infants showed evidence of memory for multiple locations, whereas 6.5-month-old infants showed evidence of memory only for a single location, and only when that location was easily identified by salient landmarks. In the absence of such landmarks, 6.5-month-old infants showed evidence of memory for the overall configuration or shape. This developmental trajectory for spatial VSTM is similar to that previously observed for color VSTM. These results additionally show that infants’ ability to detect changes in location is dependent on their developing sensitivity to spatial reference frames.