It’s all about location, location, location: Children’s memory for the “where” of personally experienced events

Abstract

Episodic memory is defined as the ability to recall specific past events located in a particular time and place. Over the preschool and into the school years, there are clear developmental changes in memory for when events took place. In contrast, little is known about developmental changes in memory for where events were experienced. In the present research we tested 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children’s memories for specific laboratory events, each of which was experienced in a unique location. We also tested the children memories for the conjunction of the events and their locations. Age-related differences were observed in all three types of memory (event, location, conjunction of event and location), with the most pronounced differences in memory for conjunctions of events and their locations. The results have implications for our understanding of the development of episodic memory, including suggestions of protracted development of the ability to contextualize events in their spatial locations.

Episodic memory and future thinking during early childhood: Linking the past and future

“…For instance, although 4-year-olds can verbally recall factual information learned in an experimental setting, the ability to link this information with the corresponding source (e.g., puppet, experimenter) continues to improve through at least 8 years of age (Drummey & Newcombe, 2002; Rajan, Cuevas, & Bell, 2014). Similar patterns have been found using object-background binding tasks (Lloyd et al 2009) as well as tasks that involve personally experienced events (Bauer, Doydum, Pathman, Larkina, Güeler, & Burch, 2012) with recent evidence of more advanced binding emerging between 7 years and adulthood (Yim, Dennis, & Sloutsky, 2013). …”

A complementary processes account of the development of childhood amnesia and a personal past.

“…Between the ages of 2 and 6 years, children may bind elements of events together, yet do so in a manner that fails to ensure persistence of memories over time. Consistent with this suggestion, Olson and Newcombe highlight young children's difficulties remembering the correct sources of their experiences (so-called source memory, e.g., Drummey & Newcombe, 2002;Riggins, 2014), and their difficulties creating conjunctions between items and their locations (e.g., Bauer, Doydum, Pathman, Larkina, Güler, & Burch, 2012;Sluzenski, Newcombe, & Kovacs, 2006; though see Bauer, Stewart, White, & Larkina, in press). …”

Integrating across episodes: Investigating the long-term accessibility of self-derived knowledge in 4-year-old children

“…Second, 4-year-old children can effectively use verbal reminders to access information that appears to have been forgotten (e.g., Imuta, Scarf, & Hayne, 2012; Morgan & Hayne, 2007). Third and directly related to the present paradigm, the provision of hints has been shown to facilitate knowledge extension through integration by 4-year-olds within a single learning session (Bauer et al, 2012; 2013). Moreover, these hints are maximally effective when cues correspond to specific episodes as well as when they are provided immediately before the test for knowledge extension (Bauer et al, 2013).…”

“…Furthermore, episodes are also temporally separated by the imposition of unrelated tasks between to-be-integrated passages. Importantly, when the degree of surface similarity between to-be-integrated passages was manipulated (i.e., the character was either the same or different between paired passages), knowledge extension through integration was less robust under low surface similarity conditions (Bauer et al, 2012). This finding suggests that children perceive the passages as distinct episodes rather than as one large story-reading task, otherwise performance would not have varied as a function of contextual detail.…”