Institute of Psychology, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, D-60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, D-14195 Berlin, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2021 Jul 5;31(8):3764-3779. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab046.
From age 5 to 7, there are remarkable improvements in children's cognitive abilities ("5-7 shift"). In many countries, including Germany, formal schooling begins in this age range. It is, thus, unclear to what extent exposure to formal schooling contributes to the "5-7 shift." In this longitudinal study, we investigated if schooling acts as a catalyst of maturation. We tested 5-year-old children who were born close to the official cutoff date for school entry and who were still attending a play-oriented kindergarten. One year later, the children were tested again. Some of the children had experienced their first year of schooling whereas the others had remained in kindergarten. Using 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks that assessed episodic memory formation (i.e., subsequent memory effect), we found that children relied strongly on the medial temporal lobe (MTL) at both time points but not on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In contrast, older children and adults typically show subsequent memory effects in both MTL and PFC. Both children groups improved in their memory performance, but there were no longitudinal changes nor group differences in neural activation. We conclude that successful memory formation in this age group relies more heavily on the MTL than in older age groups.
从 5 岁到 7 岁，儿童的认知能力有显著提高（“5-7 转变”）。在许多国家，包括德国，正式的学校教育都在这个年龄段开始。因此，尚不清楚接受正规学校教育在多大程度上促成了“5-7 转变”。在这项纵向研究中，我们调查了学校教育是否起到了促进成熟的作用。我们测试了那些接近入学截止日期、仍在上以游戏为导向的幼儿园的 5 岁儿童。一年后，再次对这些孩子进行了测试。一些孩子经历了他们的第一年学校教育，而另一些孩子则仍留在幼儿园。使用两项评估情节记忆形成的功能磁共振成像任务（即后续记忆效应），我们发现，在两个时间点，儿童都强烈依赖于内侧颞叶（MTL），但不依赖于前额叶皮层（PFC）。相比之下，年龄较大的儿童和成年人通常在 MTL 和 PFC 中都表现出后续记忆效应。两个儿童组的记忆表现都有所提高，但在神经激活方面没有纵向变化或组间差异。我们的结论是，在这个年龄组中，成功的记忆形成更多地依赖于 MTL，而不是年龄较大的组。
