Department of Psychology, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, VA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 May;21(3):e12583. doi: 10.1111/desc.12583. Epub 2017 Jul 4.
The ability to mentally re-experience past events improves significantly from childhood to young adulthood; however, the mechanisms underlying this ability remain poorly understood, partially because different tasks are used across the lifespan. This study was designed to address this gap by assessing the development of event-related potential (ERP) correlates associated with subjective indices of recollection. Children, adolescents, and adults performed Tulving's () remember/know paradigm while ERPs were recorded during memory encoding (Experiment 1) and retrieval (Experiment 2). Behaviorally, children recognized fewer items than adolescents and adults. All age groups reliably made subjective judgments of recollection, although the ability to make these judgments improved with age. At encoding, the ERP effect associated with recollection was present and comparable across age groups. In contrast, the ERP effect associated with recollection at retrieval differed as a function of age group; specifically, this effect was absent in children, topographically widespread in adolescents, and, consistent with previous literature, maximal over left centro-parietal leads in adults. These findings suggest that encoding processes associated with the subsequent subjective experience of recollection may be similar among children, adolescents, and adults and that age-related improvement in recollection may be primarily attributable to the development of processes that follow the initial encoding of stimuli (i.e., consolidation, storage, retrieval).
从儿童期到青年期，人们对过去事件的心理再体验能力显著提高；然而，这种能力的潜在机制仍知之甚少，部分原因是不同的任务在整个生命周期中都有使用。本研究旨在通过评估与主观回忆指标相关的事件相关电位 (ERP) 相关性来解决这一差距。儿童、青少年和成年人在进行 Tulving 的 () 记住/知道范式时，同时记录记忆编码（实验 1）和检索（实验 2）期间的 ERP。行为上，儿童识别的项目比青少年和成年人少。所有年龄组都能可靠地做出回忆的主观判断，尽管这种能力随着年龄的增长而提高。在编码时，与回忆相关的 ERP 效应在所有年龄组中都存在且相当。相比之下，与检索时回忆相关的 ERP 效应因年龄组而异；具体来说，这种效应在儿童中不存在，在青少年中广泛存在，并且与之前的文献一致，在成年人中最大程度地出现在左中央顶叶导联上。这些发现表明，与随后的回忆主观体验相关的编码过程在儿童、青少年和成年人中可能相似，并且回忆的年龄相关改善可能主要归因于刺激初始编码后过程的发展（即巩固、存储、检索）。
