Infants encode, remember objects in correlation to name specificity

According to Northwestern University research, how an object is named directly relates to the likelihood a 12-month-old infant will remember its name.

Researchers named four distinct objects differently among groups of infants, aged 12 months, to test for future object recognition. Their findings were telling; when all four distinct objects were given a common name, like “fruit,” the infants did not recognize the object later on as “fruit.” However, infants in the “Distinct Names condition” section of the experiment were able to recognize the object 3/4 times in the future, and would list the object as something more specific or defining, like “papaya, apple,” or “orange.”

According to Professor Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study and Lewis W. Menk professor of psychology in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences,

“Moreover, the precision of infants’ responses reveal that naming objects, even a single naming episode, can have a lasting impact on how infants encode that object, represent it in memory and remember it later.”

Learn more about this topic in the Northwestern Now article Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects.