Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Aug;208:105152. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105152. Epub 2021 Apr 22.
Episodic memories typically share overlapping elements in distinctive combinations, and to be valuable for future behavior they need to withstand delays. There is relatively little work on whether children have special difficulty with overlap or withstanding delay. However, Yim, Dennis, and Sloutsky (Psychological Science, 2013, Vol. 24, pp. 2163-2172) suggested that extensive overlap is more problematic for younger children, and Darby and Sloutsky (Psychological Science, 2015, Vol. 26, pp. 1937-1946) reported that a 48-h delay period actually improves children's memory for overlapping pairs of items. In the current study, we asked how children's episodic memory is affected by stimulus overlap, delay, and age using visual stimuli containing either overlapping or unique item pairs. Children aged 4 and 6 years were tested both immediately and after a 24-h delay. As expected, older children performed better than younger children, and both age groups performed worse on overlapping pairs. Surprisingly, the 24-h delay had only a marginal effect on overall accuracy. Although there were no interactions, when errors were examined, there was evidence that delay buffered memory for overlapping pairs against cross-contextual confusion for younger children.
情景记忆通常以独特的组合共享重叠的元素，并且为了对未来的行为有价值，它们需要经得起延迟。关于儿童是否特别难以处理重叠或延迟的问题，相关研究相对较少。然而，Yim、Dennis 和 Sloutsky（《心理科学》，2013 年，第 24 卷，第 2163-2172 页）认为，广泛的重叠对年幼的孩子来说更成问题，而 Darby 和 Sloutsky（《心理科学》，2015 年，第 26 卷，第 1937-1946 页）则报告称，48 小时的延迟期实际上可以提高儿童对重叠的一对物品的记忆。在当前的研究中，我们使用包含重叠或独特项目对的视觉刺激物，来询问儿童的情景记忆是如何受到刺激物重叠、延迟和年龄的影响的。我们对 4 岁和 6 岁的儿童进行了即时测试和 24 小时延迟测试。正如预期的那样，年龄较大的儿童表现得比年龄较小的儿童好，而两个年龄组在处理重叠的项目对时表现得都更差。令人惊讶的是，24 小时的延迟对整体准确性只有轻微的影响。尽管没有交互作用，但在检查错误时，有证据表明延迟缓冲了年幼儿童对重叠项目对的记忆，防止了跨情境混淆。
