Memory development beyond preschool

Question 1

Source memory tests

Answer 1

One way to investigate whether an experience is being re lived in memory is to see if that memory can be interrogated for new information. This means asking questions about the event that were not the focal element they needed to remember at the time of encoding. Source memory tests present ppts with a standard memory test and then at test unexpectedly ask about a contextual detail about the learning event.

Question 2

Reality testing and source memory

Answer 2

Children aged 4-8 years walked though 4 multi stage events. Half they did physically and half they imagined. Later, sometimes the next day and sometimes the next week, the children were asked if they actually completed the event or imagined it and asked to recall everything they could remember about the event. All age groups were better than chance at knowing the difference between imagined and real events but 4 years old were considerably worse than 6 and 8 year olds who were similar to each other. Memory for imagined events was overall significantly worse than events they completed themselves. This is testing reality monitoring, the difference between and their ability to distinguish between things they did themselves vs imagined.

Question 3

Fact vs source memory

Answer 3

Riggins (2014) Children shown a series of 6 videos each of which taught them a fact, the video was either delivered by a human adult or clownfish puppet. The next day, children were given a trivia quiz of 24 questions, 6 of which were the ones they had been taught and for each answer they were asked from whom they learned the information. The ability to remember the facts they had been taught improved linearly with age. The proportion of children being able to correctly state the source at age 4-6 is pretty low. Fact memory development was correlated with general cognitive improvements (e.g. IQ, verbal comprehension) but source memory did not. Source recall is distinct from the development of other forms of learning at this age. Children who couldn’t remember the source were asked if they ‘just knew’ the answer or were guessing. The tendency for kids to know a fact but not recall why they know it is going down with age.

Question 4

Remember/know paradigm’s

Answer 4

Ofen et al (2007) Remember/know paradigms ask ppts to comment on their own memory. They are asked if they remember seeing something or if they just know the information. Remember responses are thought to indicate episodic recollection while know responses can indicate that something is merely familiar/recognised in the absence of recollection. The number of memories that are reported as remembered increases during childhood and adolescence whereas the number reported as known does not. Gave ages 8-24 a recognition memory test. Substantial increase in the proportion of remembered so increase in the proportion of things we are able to remember over time compared to no increase in the proportion of things we just know. Proportion of words remembered goes up whereas known does not.

Question 5

Autobiographical memory

Answer 5

Piolino et al (2007) autobiographical memory is episodic memory for events of your own life. We are looking at how detailed the memories are or give them a prompt word and see where the memories they produce come from. These looked at detail and quality of memories as well as when they were from. Children produce more detailed and longer lasting autobiographical memories as they age through middle childhood. Older children are more likely to report these autobiographical memories as remembered rather than known. Children aged 9 and above were able to have good memories from the recent school year but only 11+ children were really good at remembering further away than this. Children 11+ could do the remember thing instead of the know thing but bellow this, they were less good at the remember thing and more likely to just say they just know they did something.

Question 6

Autobiographical memory in childhood

Answer 6

Bauer and Larkina (2014) Relative to adolescents and adults, children’s verbal reports of their memories feature fewer where and when elements and tend to focus on what happened or who was there. They coded children’s memories for who, what object, what action, when, where, why, how description, how evaluation and breadth. They found that spontaneously provided temporal information increased significantly between 7 and 9 and was only comparable to adults by age 11. Freely reported autobiographical memories tend to be from more recent events. Younger children’s forgetting rate, based on recency of oldest memories reported, was around 4 times that of adults. The extent to which the memory drop off can be described as a curve decreased as they get older so the curve described younger kids better than it did older kids and adults. The younger you are at the time you lay down a memory, the quicker that memory is going to be forgotten. This is maybe the reason we don’t remember a lot from our childhood. Maybe we are laying down the memories but we just are forgetting them quicker, they are just not as robust and don’t entail as many details that are easy to remember

Question 7

Levels of retrieval support

Answer 7

Free recall - ppts asked to just say everything they remember
Cued recall - ppts shown part of a memory and asked to remember the other part
Recognition - ppts shown the memory and asked if they remember this

Question 8

What, where, when task at different levels of retrieval support

Answer 8

Picard et al (2012) looked at children aged 4-16. The experimenter describes a day in the life of a child. The child is described performing 9 activities each with a specific time and place. They are the given different levels of support for retrieval:
Free recall - tell me as much as you can remember about the day
Cued recall - at a certain point, this happened, can you tell me what it happened with and where
Recognition - did this take place in this spot, in this room with this object
Timeline - give pictures of events and asked to place them in order to test temporal visual memory
Memory for the activities themselves (facts) was already good at age 4 and at ceiling at age 7. Spatial memory improved from 4-12. Temporal memory appears to level off at around 8. The proportion of free recall responses increases. On the storyboard, visual temporal memory task reflects verbal temporal memory task. They found improvement from 4 to 8 and relatively flat thereafter.

Question 9

What, where, when in middle childhood

Answer 9

Guo et al (2023) Children ages 6-12 did a treasure hunt task. Children hide objects around complex scenes across two different days then have to remember:
Unintegrated information - doing the what, where, when tasks separately, what they hid, where they hid things and in which order they hid things
Integrated information - doing the what, where, when tasks at the same time, what they hid where, on that specific day
They were given:
Hight support - recognition tasks
Lower support - cued recall tasks
They found general improvement across the age range. Unintegrated has a much smoother developmental trajectory whereas integrated has a bit of a jump. We see better performance in high support compared to low support. There was also an apparent discontinuity at around 9 years when they contrasted the high and low support as well as the integrated and unintegrated (averaged out scores from each what, where, when task individually). Subtracting integrated from non-integrated to see the level of difference between them to tell us how able you are to integrate if you have definitely remember all the individual bits of information. Subtracting high support from low support would give us your ability to retrieve things with low support given your ability to recall things with high support. When we do this for both, what we see again is this big jump, 6-8 year olds have a bigger gap between conditions so harder time integrating and lower ability on low support recall than 9-12 year olds.
Therefore, children get less reliant on cues as they get older and children’s ability to bind information improved but maybe not linearly.

Question 10

What, where, when in late childhood and adolescence

Answer 10

Menchie et al (2021) gave ppts aged 10-19 the treasure hunt task (where children hide objects around complex scenes across two different days and asked to do integrated and unintegrated recall at different levels of recall support). Associative Memory performance showed an inverse U shaped trajectory but non-associative memory did not. The difference between associative and non-associative performance also showed a quadratic trajectory. This suggests the requirement for integration was driving this pattern, rather than memory for the individual elements. There is not a dramatic change between age 10 and 19 in non-integrated information for there is a bit of a change in integrated. Integrated memory gets worse after age 16, it increases to age 16 and then drops off. This same pattern did not emerge when contrasting high and low support variants of the task. This suggests nonlinear development is specific to association rather than more challenging memory more generally.

Question 11

What, where, when in adolescence

Answer 11

Keresztes et al (2017) found a similar pattern of nonlinear development in association specifically across the 4-25 age range, missing out 12-16.

Question 12

Peak grey matter volume in different brain areas

Answer 12

Giedd et al (1999) Brain areas important for memory do not all seem to show a linear increase throughout development. Like memory performance, some areas show a quadratic pattern of development. Peak grey matter volume has been suggested to be achieved in the frontal lobes at around 11 years and at around 17 years in the temporal lobe and hippocampus.

Question 13

Synaptogenesis and grey matter volume

Answer 13

Huttenlochler (1979) The growth followed by reduction in grey matter has been suggested to reflect synaptogenesis followed by synaptic pruning of obsolete connections producing maximally efficient neural pathways. According to this account, at peak grey volume, large numbers of obsolete connections may be associated with inefficient cognitive performance which may then be followed by improvements as pruning progresses. This is likely to be over simplistic.

Question 14

Individual differences in grey matter volume development

Answer 14

Foulkes and Blakemore (2018) found substantial individual differences in trajectories of grey matter volume development.

Question 15

Hippocampus changes through middle childhood and adolescence

Answer 15

Gogtay et al (2006) Changes in the hippocampal microstructure occur through middle childhood and adolescence. The anterior hippocampus loses mass and the posterior hippocampus gains mass from age 4 to 25. The anterior hippocampus is thought to be important to retrieving flexibly bound representations while the posterior is thought to aid retrieval of more fixed perceptual representation of the episode.

Question 16

Specialisation of hippocampal regions for episodic memory

Answer 16

Keresztes et al (2017) Show age related decreases in anterior hippocampal volume and increases in posterior hippocampus may promote the regional specialisation of hippocampal regions for episodic memory. Similarly, different subregions of the hippocampus show different development trajectories with some being linear and some quadratic.

Question 17

Autobiographical memory in the brain

Answer 17

Bauer et al (2017) in fMRI studies of adults ages 19-30 vs children aged 8-10. Autobiographical memory recruited broadly the same areas in both groups. Adults showed greater activation in frontal and parietal areas. In children the same areas are recruited as in adults but what changes is the balance of activity between different areas when you are recording. It’s not how active the brain is but how these brain regions are communicating network wise and how ‘mature’’ that is.

Question 18

Brain activity and memory performance

Answer 18

Rajan et al (2021) children ages 6 and 8 years were asked to remember items, scenes and item scene combinations. The age groups performed equivalently when no binding was involved but the 8 year olds significantly outperformed the 6 year olds in the binding condition. Increased theta oscillations during retrieval in all conditions, there is no significant age effect. Theta oscillations in parietal theta EEG at P3 during retrieval predicted memory performance. Can predict how well they are going to do based on how mature the theta oscillations are. Those who are showing that specific activity have that specific performance and those who aren’t, aren’t there yet, it’s not necessarily about age, it’s about brain maturity.

Question 19

Brain development and performance: overall hippocampus

Answer 19

Keresztes et al (2017) Both structure and activity changes through childhood and adolescence are linked with performance improvements but not always on a simple way. Overall hippocampal structural maturity (not size) is associated with memory performance.

Question 20

Brain development and performance: anterior hippocampus

Answer 20

Ghetti et al (2010) Specialisation of the hippocampus subregions changes over time. Anterior hippocampus is activated specifically for source memory in 14 year old adults but in a transitional period in 8 and 10 year olds.