To have and to hold: Episodic memory in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children

Abstract

Episodic memory endows us with the ability to reflect on our past and plan for our future. Most theorists argue that episodic memory emerges during the preschool period and that its emergence might herald the end of childhood amnesia. Here, we show that both 3- and 4-year-old children form episodic memories, but that 3-year-old children fail to retain those memories following a delay (Experiments 1 and 2). In contrast, 4-year-old children retained episodic memories over delays of 24 hr (Experiment 1) and 1 week (Experiment 3). This marked change in the retention of episodic memories between 3 and 4 years of age suggests that it is our ability to retain, rather than to form, an episodic memory that limits our ability to recall episodes from early childhood.

Alterations in development of hippocampal and cortical memory mechanisms following very preterm birth

“…However, distinct neural networks and activation patterns have also been proposed for episodic and working memory processing, and in this paper we will describe how these are organized in the typically developing brain. At a behavioural level, the capacity to form episodic memories is believed to emerge at around 4 to 5 years of age,4 and episodic memory performance improves during childhood until adolescence, with older children being more successful at integrating information with its contextual details 5. Such improvements may parallel the development of the brain's connectional architecture, which we describe in detail later in this review.…”

Children’s Binding of What-Where-When-Whoin Episodic Memory: Identifying Oneself in the Past

“…In the first place, the age at which performance on video selection rose above chance in the jungle task is not markedly different from the age at which children succeed on other "conceptual" (see Introduction) tests of episodic memory using free recall (Perner and Ruffman, 1995), direct-versus-indirect experience , and the spoon-test methodology (Scarf et al, 2013). It is likely, then, that requiring children explicitly to represent themselves in the past in an episodic memory task makes no significant cognitive demands additional to those recruited by these other conceptual episodic tasks.…”

Securing the future by remembering the past: But just when does this past and future begin to develop?

“…That both episodic memory and episodic foresight develop in tandem is consistent with neuroscientific evidence demonstrating that both of these processes rely on the activation of many of the same neural regions (e.g., Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, & Schacter, 2009). Scarf et al (2013) also examined episodic memory for the problem and used a delay between problem presentation and item selection. They showed that despite being able to form episodic memories for the problem, when the delay between the Development of Memory Futures 7 problem and solution selection was longer than 15 minutes, 3-year-olds did not retain the relevant problem information over the delay.…”

“…Indeed, these findings are in line with a wealth of evidence showing that improvement in children's ability to store information in memory (i.e., consolidation) is critical to the development of episodic memory (Bauer, 2009). What Scarf et al (2013) have added is that these changes in retention of past experiences are also critical to the development of episodic foresight.…”

“…As this aspect of memory emerges, there are at least four proximate mechanisms that have been identified that need to be in place for the mature functioning of episodic foresight: (1) development of storage and retention processes (i.e., consolidation; e.g. Scarf et al, 2013), ones that depend on neurological maturation (e.g., Bauer, 2009); (2) development of retrieval skills so the past that is available in storage is also accessible (e.g., Atance & Sommerville, in press); (3) age-related changes in binding so that past experiences become better integrated in associative networks (e.g., Richmond & Pan, 2013), again something that depends on neurological maturation (e.g., Townsend, Richmond, Vogel-Farley, & Thomas, 2010); and (4) age-related improvements in executive processing (e.g., response inhibition, working memory; see Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Together these behavioral and neurobiological developments determine the emergence of both episodic memory for the past and episodic foresight used to plan for the future.…”