ONTOGENY OF EPISODIC MEMORY: A COMPONENTIAL APPROACH

Abstract

Episodic memory binds together the people, objects, and locations that make up the specific events of our lives, and allows the recall of our past in the service of current and future goals. Recent models of memory have posited that the hippocampus instantiates computations critical for episodic memory including mnemonic discrimination, relational binding, and holistic retrieval. Collectively, this set of studies aim to chart the ontogeny of each key components of episodic memory. We found robust improvements in children’s abilities to form complex relational structures and to make fine-grained discrimination for individual items from age 4 to age 6. However, relational memory dependent on context discrimination appears to follow a more protracted development. Furthermore, relational binding and mnemonic discrimination (item and context levels) undergo age-related decrements in senescence. Despite relatively poor relational binding capabilities, children as young as age 4 are able to retrieve multi-element events holistically, such as successfully retrieving of one aspect of an event predicts the retrieval success of other aspects from the same event. Critically, the degree of holistic episodic retrieval increases from age 4 to young adulthood. This multi-process approach provides important theoretical insights into lifespan profile of episodic memory.