Seven-month-old infants chunk items in memory

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by “chunking” object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose working memory capacity is still maturing, also can chunk items in memory. In Experiment 1, we found that in the absence of chunking cues, infants failed to remember three identical hidden objects. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that infants successfully remembered three hidden objects when provided with overlapping spatial and featural chunking cues. In Experiment 4, we found that infants did not chunk when provided with either spatial or featural chunking cues alone. Finally, in Experiment 5, we found that infants also failed to chunk when spatial and featural cues specified different chunks (i.e., were pitted against each other). Taken together, these results suggest that chunking is available before working memory capacity has matured but still may undergo important development over the first year of life.