Most adults do not remember anything before the age of 3 or 4, a gap that researchers had chalked up to the vagaries of the still-developing infant brain. By some accounts, the infant brain was just not equipped to remember much.
Textbooks referred to the deficiency as infant amnesia.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers University who died on Oct. 2 at 72, challenged the theory, showing in a series of papers in the early 1980s that babies remember plenty. A 3-month-old can recall what he or she learned yesterday, she found, and a 9-month-old can remember a game for as long as a month and a half.
She cited experiments suggesting that memory processes in adults and infants are virtually the same, and argued that infant memories were never lost. They just become increasingly harder to retrieve as the child grows, learns language and loses touch with the visual triggers that had kept those memories sharp — a view from between the bars of a crib, say, or the view of the floor as a crawler, not a toddler, sees it.
Not all of Dr. Rovee-Collier’s theories won over the psychology establishment, which still uses the infant amnesia concept to explain why people do not remember life as a baby.
But her insights about an infant’s memory and ability to learn have been widely accepted, and have helped recast scientific thinking about the infant mind over the past 30 years. Since the first of her 200 papers was published, infant cognitive studies has undergone a boom in university programs around the country.
It was a field that had been largely unexplored in any systematic way by the giants of psychological theory. Freud and Jean Piaget never directly addressed the subject of infant memory. William James, considered the father of American psychology, once hazarded a guess that the human baby’s mind was a place of “blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Dr. Rovee-Collier, who in 1974 established the Rutgers Early Learning Project at the campus in Piscataway, N.J., was among the first psychologists to seek answers about infants’ cognitive ability from infants themselves — by testing them.
She chanced on a method not long after the birth of her first son, Benjamin. As a full-time student working on her doctoral thesis, she had been trying to come up with a way to entertain the baby while she studied at home. Knowing that he liked the musical mobile suspended over his crib, she attached one end of a ribbon to the mobile and the other end to Benjamin’s foot. Benjamin enjoyed the results, and foot-shaking became a favorite activity, allowing his mother to get a fair amount of work done, she told interviewers.
The eureka moment, she wrote, came when she noticed that Benjamin, at 3 months, was shaking that foot even when he was not in the crib, as if wanting to play with the mobile some more. He seemed to remember.
To test this hypothesis, she recreated the ribbon-rigging hundreds of times, conducting the test on thousands of babies at their homes (with willing parents on hand) and under variable conditions. She found that 2-month-old babies could remember a connection between foot-shaking and mobile-moving for a day or two, and that a 6-month-old could generally remember it for about two weeks.
“She was the one who opened the field of infant memory to research,” said Patricia J. Bauer, a professor of psychology and senior associate dean at Emory University in Atlanta. “Before her, there weren’t many people thinking about what babies know.”
Dr. Rovee-Collier was born Susan Carolyn Kent in Nashville on April 7, 1942, and grew up in Baton Rouge, La. Her father, George C. Kent Jr., was a professor of anatomy and biology at Louisiana State University. Her mother, Lila, was a seamstress and homemaker.
Ms. Kent graduated from L.S.U. in 1962 with a degree in psychology, and received her master’s degree in 1964 and her Ph.D. in experimental child psychology in 1966 from Brown University. She taught at Trenton State College before joining Rutgers in 1970 and lived in Stockton, N.J.
The university, where she was on the faculty for 43 years, announced her death.
She and her first husband, David Rovee, were divorced in 1975. She married George Collier, a psychology professor at Rutgers, in 1977. Over the next 30 years, Dr. Rovee-Collier’s work explored many facets of infant learning and memory, and produced several theories about how most adults become untethered from their infant memories.
“There’s no question that we remember our early childhood memories,” Dr. Rovee-Collier said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1984. “We just have a great deal of difficulty getting to them. Babies, like elephants, never forget.”
Her husband survives her, as do her two sons, Christopher, an assistant professor of English at L.S.U., and Benjamin, whose role in his mother’s early research prompted him to claim — after he became a financial planner — that she owed him royalties.