Infants' memory for isolated tones and the effects of interference

IN MOST ADULTS, PITCH MEMORY FOR SINGLE tones is of short duration, and the presence of interference reduces performance in pitch matching tasks.We show that 6-month-old infants can remember the pitch of a tone for at least 2.5 s but that, like adults, their memory is disrupted by tones interpolated between repetitions of the tone-to-be-remembered. For both infants and adults, we found a significant negative correlation between the number of interference tones and proportion correct in detecting a change in pitch. Performance reached chance levels with 5 interference tones for infants, and 15 interference tones for adults. This indicates that although there may be a developmental increase with age in the length of time a memory can be held, for both 6-month-old infants and adults, memory for the absolute pitch of isolated tones fades rapidly.