Event congruency and episodic encoding: A developmental fMRI study

Memory development: implications for adults recalling childhood experiences in the courtroom

“…In this study 61 adults remembered more than children, but all participants exhibited the congruency effect (i.e., better recognition for congruent than incongruent pairings). Neuroimaging data revealed that during the encoding phase, adults showed activity in regions known to be associated with semantic/conceptual processing (e.g., left PFC, parietal and occipito-temporal cortices), whereas children showed activity in regions that are involved earlier in the processing sequence (e.g., the right occipital cortex).…”

“…These include studies of both the automatic (memory processes that may not be under conscious control; e.g., feature sampling) and strategic (memory processes that are under conscious control; e.g., semantic clustering of to-be-remembered information) aspects of memory (both at encoding and retrieval) and studies of changes in children's knowledge base [56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63] . Results have shown that dlPFC regions that mediate the encoding of detailed episodic representations of experiences may have a protracted period of development than the MTL 52, 56-63 (but see [64][65][66] , so that memory formation early in childhood depends more on MTL contributions 26,36,38,[67][68] .…”

“…Other studies 61 have examined the influence of changes in knowledge base and memory 61 . Here, children (8.5 to 11.5 years of age) and adults participated in an encoding task that compared the encoding of noun-color pairings that either were matched with one's world knowledge (e.g., seeing the word tomato printed on a red background) or were mismatched (e.g., seeing the word tomato printed on a blue background).…”

Distinctiveness Benefits Novelty (and Not Familiarity), but Only Up to a Limit: The Prior Knowledge Perspective

“…In a seemingly direct contradiction, a large body of work demonstrates a mnemonic advantage for repetitive familiar items (e.g., Badham & Maylor, 2015;Bein et al, 2015;Craik & Tulving, 1975;Ebbinghaus, 1885Ebbinghaus, /1913Maril et al, 2011;Poppenk, K€ ohler, & Moscovitch, 2010;Schulman, 1974). One prominent example is the "semantic congruency effect" (SCE), whereby stimuli that are congruent with previous knowledge are better remembered than novel stimuli that are incongruent with pre-existing semantic representations (Bein et al, 2015;Brewer & Treyens, 1981;Craik & Tulving, 1975;Gronau & Shachar, 2015;Schulman, 1974;Tibon, Gronau, Scheuplein, Mecklinger, & Levy, 2014;van Kesteren, Ruiter, Fern andez, & Henson, 2012).…”

“…Importantly, familiarity mnemonic advantage was demonstrated mainly in paradigms which included equal experimental contexts for familiar and novel stimuli (Craik & Tulving, 1975;Maril et al, 2011;Schulman, 1974;Staresina, Gray, & Davachi, 2009), possibly preventing any distinctiveness-related advantage for novel stimuli.…”