Short- and long-delay consolidation of memory accessibility and precision across childhood and young adulthood.

Abstract

Childhood is a period when memory consolidation and knowledge base undergo rapid changes. The present study examined short-delay (overnight) and long-delay (after a 2-week period) consolidation of new information either congruent or incongruent with prior knowledge in typically developing 6-to 8-year-old children (n = 32), 9-to 11-year-old children (n = 33), and 18-to 30-year-old young adults (YA; n = 39). Both memory accessibility (cued recall of objects) and precision (precision of object placement) of initially well-learned object-scene pairs were measured. Our results showed that overnight, memory accessibility declined similarly in all age groups; memory precision improved more in younger children (YC) compared to older children (OC) and even declined in YA. After a 2-week period, both memory accessibility and precision became worse. Specifically, while age groups showed similar decline in memory accessibility, precision decline was less in YC than in OC and YA. The accessibility and precision of congruent and incongruent information changed similarly with consolidation in all age groups. Taken together, our results showed that, for initially well-learned information, YC have robust memory consolidation, despite their overall lower mnemonic performance compared to OC and YA, which is potentially crucial for stable and precise knowledge accumulation early on in development. Public Significance StatementThis study suggests that children can access well-learned information and retain its precision over long delays, indicating robust memory consolidation. It is not guided by congruency bias, suggesting equal weighting of incoming information and flexible schema formation. Because rapid accumulation of knowledge in children is crucial for later academic success, understanding how memories are retained as time passes is important for promoting successful and effective learning across different developmental groups.

Neural Correlates and Reinstatement of Recent and Remote Memory: A Comparison Between Children and Young Adults

“…Concerning memory consolidation, our results are in line with previous studies that reported worse memory retention for associative information in school age children compared to adults (Østby et al, 2012; Schommartz et al, 2023, 2024). On the other hand, our results are not in line with sleep-related beneficial effects on mnemonic performance of 7-to-12-year-old children after one night delay (Peiffer et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2018) that were shown for novel stimuli not related to any prior knowledge (in the sense of arbitrary stimuli).…”