Two rooms, two representations? Episodic‐like memory in toddlers and preschoolers

Abstract

Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, we tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters; each room contained two identical sets of four containers, but arranged differently. A distinct toy was hidden in a distinct container in each room. In Experiment 1, which involved children between 15 and 26 months who were prompted with a very explicit cue (a part of the hidden toy), we found a marked shift in performance with age: while 15- to 20-month-olds concentrated their searches on the two containers that sometimes contained toys, they did not distinguish between them according to context, but 21-26-month-olds did. However, surprisingly, without toy cues, even the youngest children showed a fragile ability to disambiguate the two containers by room context. In Experiment 2, we tested 34- to 40-month-olds and 64- to 72-month-olds without toy cues. The 5-year-olds were nearly perfect, and the 3-year-olds showed a significant preference for the correct container given only the context. In Experiment 3, we filled in the age range, and also investigated the effects of the use of labels (i.e. names of experimenters and rooms) and of familiarization time, in groups of 34- to 40-month-olds, 42- to 48-month-olds, and 50- to 56-month-olds. Neither labels nor familiarization time had an effect. Across experiments, there was regular age-related improvement in context-based memory. Overall, the results suggest that children's episodic memory may undergo an early qualitative change, yet to be precisely characterized, and that continuing increments in the use of contextual cues occur throughout the preschool period. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkwEFw0UEz4&list=PLwxXcOKHPC0llAPVcJyW4EtzlA934A2Rz&index=1.

Binding of Episodic Memories in the Rat

“…Memory of such an episode is thought to reflect binding of a fully integrated representation, rather than memory of unconnected features [4-7]. However, it is not known if rodents form bound representations.…”

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

“…Given this, it may be fruitful in this context to bridge the neuroscience and the cognitive-developmental psychology of episodic memory in the following way. The kind of early episodic memory tapped by studies such as those by Burns et al (2014) and by Newcombe et al (2014) is of a kind recruiting the hippocampus, insofar as the essential requirement in their tasks was to locate past events within an objective, allocentric framework (e.g., an action near a room landmark, in Burns et al; a toy in a certain container in Newcombe et al). Allocentric spatial facts had to be bound to temporal and semantic facts, but with no requirement to locate oneself as a viewing body within the scene.…”

“…It can be viewed within cognitive development as something that depends upon the possession of certain concepts (such as theory of mind and causal insights into how experience causes memory: Perner, 2001), and as developing after 4 years (Perner & Ruffman, 1995). Alternatively it can be viewed as something more cognitively minimal and as essentially spatiotemporal (Russell & Hanna, 2012), with this form of episodic memory being found in children well under 4 years (Burns, Russell & Russell, 2014;Newcombe et al, 2014).…”

“…The What-Where-When shorthand in animal (Babb and Crystal, 2005;Clayton & Dickinson, 1998;Eacott and Norman, 2004;Iordanova, Good, and Honey, 2008) and developmental (Hayne & Imuta, 2011;Newcombe, Balcomb, Ferrara, Hansen, and Koski, 2014) research means that episodic recall minimally depends upon binding spatiotemporal content (Where and When) to semantic content (What: an object or action). One immediate interpretive difficulty with this designation is that "temporal" can mean a number of different things.…”

“…One immediate interpretive difficulty with this designation is that "temporal" can mean a number of different things. For example, does "temporal" mean how long ago the event took place (as in Clayton & Dickinson, 1998), the simultaneously present context of testing (as in Eacott and Norman, 2004;Newcombe et al, 2014), the day of the event (as in Iordanova et al, 2014), or the order in which locations were visited (as in Hayne & Imuta, 2011)?…”