ABSTRACT
Gil Meier explored the possibility of using primate colonies to study the effect of early mother–infant interactions on subsequent behavior of the infant. In a programmatic way, he was asking whether very early infant–parent interactions are critical to later development. Individual differences among infants in recognition memory appear potentially important for the prediction of later intellectual functioning. When Down's syndrome and normal infants were compared on recognition memory tasks that were relatively easy, there was no significant difference between groups; when the task was more difficult, however, the normal infants were clearly superior. Some of the effects found with infants are quite reminiscent of retroactive and proactive interference effects found in adult human learning studies. Friedman presented evidence indicating that habituation to visual stimuli can occur in some infants in the first day of life and seems to be related to such factors as sex, age, state, and maternal parity.
