Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 Mar;21(2). doi: 10.1111/desc.12556. Epub 2017 Mar 2.
Episodic memory relies on memory for the relations among multiple elements of an event and the ability to discriminate among similar elements of episodes. The latter phenomenon, termed pattern separation, has been studied mainly in young and older adults with relatively little research on children. Building on prior work with young children, we created an engaging computer-administered relational memory task assessing what-where relations. We also modified the Mnemonic Similarity Task used to assess pattern discrimination in young and older adults for use with preschool children. Results showed that 4-year-olds performed significantly worse than 6-year-olds and adults on both tasks, whereas 6-year-olds and adults performed comparably, even though there were no ceiling effects. However, performance on the two tasks did not correlate, suggesting that two distinct mnemonic processes with different developmental trajectories may contribute to age-related changes in episodic memory.
情景记忆依赖于对事件多个元素之间关系的记忆，以及辨别相似情景元素的能力。后一种现象被称为模式分离，主要在年轻和老年成年人中进行了研究，而对儿童的研究相对较少。基于先前对幼儿的研究，我们创建了一个有趣的计算机管理的关系记忆任务，评估什么在哪里的关系。我们还修改了用于评估年轻和老年成年人模式识别的记忆相似性任务，以用于学龄前儿童。结果表明，4 岁儿童在两项任务中的表现明显差于 6 岁儿童和成年人，而 6 岁儿童和成年人的表现相当，尽管没有上限效应。然而，两项任务的表现没有相关性，这表明两种不同的记忆过程具有不同的发展轨迹，可能对情景记忆的年龄相关变化有贡献。
