دانلود رایگان مقاله مطالعه ERP در توسعه حافظه اپیزودیک در میانه دوران کودکی

Abstract

Children have often been assumed to rely on familiarity in episodic memory retrieval, based on low source memory performance. However, the frontal familiarity-related event-related potential (ERP) correlate is typically absent in children, in contrast to a prominent parietal old/new effect reflecting recollection. Here, we presented identical and perceptually changed pictures after incidental and intentional encoding to assess whether (a) identical perceptual item features or (b) a high memory performance promoted by intentional encoding would elicit an ERP correlate associated with familiarity in 7-year-olds (N = 20) and 10-year-olds (N = 20). Despite generally high memory performance we observed frontal old/new effects in older children only, selectively for perceptually identical items after intentional encoding. By contrast, parietal old/new effects were observed in both groups. Furthermore, late parietal old/new effects were much smaller for changed items, suggesting that older children employed additional recollective search processes to differentiate between identical and changed items.

4.5. Conclusion

The focus of the present study was to assess ERP correlates of familiarity-based retrieval in children, which has previously only beenreported by a single studyusing a response-deadline to eliminate the alternative route to episodicmemory retrieval (Mecklinger et al., 2011). While no ERP correlates of familiarity-based retrieval were observed in younger children, older children relied on familiarity under certain conditions only. Replicating and extending previous work, we observed ERP correlates of familiarity for identical item presentations after intentional encoding in older children. By contrast, no reliable old/new ERP effects were observed for changed items and after incidental encoding in any group, likely reflecting a larger heterogeneity in processing. Itis possible that some older children mainly rely on recollection, like younger children, whereas others already evaluate an item’s familiarity, like adults. Analyzing this heterogeneity.