The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood

Mary L. Courage, Nelson Cowan, Mary L. Courage, Nelson Cowan

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367860332
• eBook ISBN: 9781000576313
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood provides a thorough update and expansion of the previous edition and offers new research on significant themes and ideas that have emerged in the past decade such as the cognitive neuroscience of memory development, autobiographical memory and infantile amnesia, and the cognitive and social factors that underlie memory for events.

In this volume, Courage and Cowan bring together leading international experts to review the current state of the science of memory development in their own research areas. They note questions of theory and basic science addressed in their research, highlight the real-world applications of those findings, and propose an agenda for future research. The book also considers the implications of their work for the development of atypical children, specifically, how these new findings might be adapted to enrich the lives of those children and to inform and validate our current expectations of individual differences in the development of typical children. The first of three groups of chapters focuses on basic neurobiological, perceptual, and cognitive processes that underlie memory and its development (i.e., encoding, consolidation and storage, retrieval). The second group focuses primarily on the social, contextual, and cultural factors that enable, shape, and mediate these basic processes, while the rest of the chapters focus on practical applications of this knowledge to real-world settings and issues.

The book provides a new look at memory development, including new topics such as spatial representation and spatial working, prospective memory, false memories, and memory and culture. This classic yet contemporary volume will appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students of developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as to developmental psychologists who want a compendium of key topics in memory development.

1 A Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to the Study of Memory

Tracy Riggins and Patricia J. Bauer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016533-1

Much of the authors’ work discussed was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-094758, HD-079518, TR) and (HD-28425, HD-42483, PJB) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-1749280, TR). The authors thank the many colleagues who have helped to shape their thinking on memory and its development; and the infants, children, and families who make this work possible. We also thank Angela Ji for her assistance with creating Figures.

The Cognitive Neuroscience of the Development of Memory

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine marveled at everyday mnemonic process, likening memory to a “spacious palace” in which is stored “…the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses…for thought to recall…” (Saint Augustine, ~401 C.E.). In the two millennia since Saint Augustine wrote these words our explanations of memory and how it functions have moved beyond the poetic metaphor of a “spacious palace” to the more concrete realities of modern psychological and neural sciences. However, what has not changed is the nature of the phenomenon we are attempting to explain. In his time, Saint Augustine wondered how one “…discern(s) the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing….but remembering only.” Present-day psychologists and neuroscientists are asking essentially the same question as we ponder how the roughly 1500 grams (3½ pounds) of tissue that sits in the bony case atop our shoulders manages to vividly recreate—and even allows us to re-live—events and experiences from the past. The modern-day developmental scientist further questions how the material substrate and the processes it subserves develops from infancy through childhood and adolescence.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the development of memory in terms of the neural systems and basic mnemonic processes that permit memories to be formed, retained, and later retrieved. We undertake this project as a revision of a chapter written by Bauer, in the Second Edition of the volume (2009, indeed, the opening paragraph is re-used from the previous edition). Reflecting changes in the field over the decade-plus since the earlier edition, we have abbreviated sections that have seen fewer developments and expanded sections dealing with areas of heightened research focus. Yet we note that the level of analysis in this chapter is but one of many that ultimately will be required to explain how memory works and how it develops. A satisfying solution to the puzzle of memory also will entail consideration of “higher level” influences such as the social forces that shape what children come to view as important to remember and even how they express their memories. Multiple perspectives are necessary because memory is a complex, multi-dimensional process. Indeed, as elaborated below, a guiding assumption in the literature is that memory is not even a unitary construct. Rather, there are different types of memory that involve different processes subserved by different neural substrates. Because the most definitive work uniting memory behavior (function) with its underlying neural substrate (structure) has been conducted with adult humans and nonhuman animals, we begin the chapter at the end of development (so to speak) rather than at the beginning. The discussion then moves to consideration of the emergence of a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective in development, followed by the analysis of brain-behavior relations in infancy through childhood and adolescence.

More than One Type of Memory

There are many different types of memory, based on the type of content processed (e.g., names, dates, facts, and events or motor procedures and perceptual skills); the rules of operation (conscious access or not); the function served (e.g., rapid vs. gradual learning); and of critical importance to the goals of this chapter, the neural substrates involved (e.g., medial-temporal structures vs. deep nuclei of the brain stem) and their ontogenetic time courses (i.e., early vs. later in development; see Schacter & Tulving, 1994; Schacter et al., 2000, for discussion). Application of these criteria differentiates the particular type of memory that is the subject of most of the work in this chapter, namely, episodic memory, which in turn falls under the larger rubric of explicit or declarative memory (e.g., Squire, 1992): memories of names, dates, places, and events, to which one has conscious access. Specifically, episodic memory is devoted to specific events that are located in a particular place and time, retrieval of which is accompanied by autonoetic or self-knowing awareness: a mental re-experience of a previous moment in the past (Wheeler, 2000). Because the development of the neural substrate subserving episodic memory has received the most research attention, relations between neural structures and mnemonic behavior in the domain of declarative memory are the focus of this chapter (see Bauer, 2013, for a more comprehensive discussion of different types/forms of memory).

The Neural Bases of Declarative Memory in Adults

The major aim of this chapter is to describe and explain developmental changes in declarative memory by relating age-related changes in the brain with age-related changes in memory. That agenda is furthered by examination of the neural bases of declarative memory in adults, in whom the network of structures that supports explicit recognition and recall is best articulated.

Early Investigations of Relations between Brain and Behavior

The single most significant case study of relations between brain and behavior has been patient H. M. (Henry Molaison), who underwent bilateral removal of large portions of his temporal lobes as a treatment for an intractable seizure disorder (Scoville & Milner, 1957; see Annese et al., 2014 for detailed information on the lesion). The procedure was a successful treatment for H. M.'s seizures, yet it produced a devastating and specific impairment in his ability to form new declarative memories (Milner, Corkin, & Teuber, 1968). The pattern of deficit and sparing in patient H. M. provided strong evidence of a link between medial-temporal lobe structures—and the hippocampus in particular—and the formation of new long-term declarative memories. The link was confirmed by subsequent research with animal models in which the relation could be tested more directly (Mishkin et al., 1982; Squire & Zola-Morgan, 1983), as well as contemporary research using neuroimaging (e.g., functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging—fMRI see Kim, 2011). These studies also have made clear that the hippocampus is but one neural structure in a larger network involved in the formation, maintenance, and subsequent retrieval of declarative memories in general and episodic memories in particular.

The Declarative Memory Network

In adult humans, the formation of new declarative memories depends on a neural network that, in addition to the hippocampus, includes the medial-temporal cortices as well as neocortical structures (e.g., Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001; Kandel & Squire, 2000; Zola & Squire, 2000). A general overview of some regions in this network is schematically represented in Figure 1.1. It is best illustrated by a review of each step in the process by which memories are formed and subsequently retrieved (see Bauer, 2009, for an expanded treatment of these steps).

Figure 1.1 a) Lateral view of human brain. Schematic representation of selected memory-related regions. OFG = orbital frontal gyrus), SFG = superior frontal gyrus, IFG = inferior frontal gyrus, ITG = inferior temporal gyrus. b) Medial view of human brain. Schematic representation of selected memory-related brain regions in the Medial Temporal Lobe.

Encoding

Encoding of experience into a memory trace begins with the perception of an event. Importantly, perceptual experience is carried out by multiple brain regions distributed across the cortex. For instance, tactile information from the skin and proprioceptive inputs from the muscles and joints registers in primary somatosensory cortex. At the same time, form, color, and motion information registers in primary visual cortex (occipital lobe), and sound registers in primary auditory cortex (temporal lobe). The primary sensory cortices project the information to unimodal sensory association areas where it is integrated into whole percepts of what objects and events feel like, look like, and sound like, respectively. Unimodal sensory association areas, in turn, project to multimodal posterior, anterior, and limbic association areas where inputs from the different sense modalities are integrated and maintained over the short term (i.e., on the order of 30 seconds).

Consolidation and Storage

For information to endure beyond the sensory experience of it, it must undergo additional processing. The processing that turns immediate perceptual experience into an enduring memory trace involves integration and stabilization of the inputs from the different cortical regions. These tasks, collectively termed consolidation, are thought to be performed by medial-temporal structures (including the hippocampus, Figure 1.1b), in concert with cortical areas. Whereas consolidation processes begin upon registration of a stimulus, they continue for hours, days, months, and even years. Throughout this time, information is especially vulnerable to forgetting.

The suggestion that consolidation processes take time—and that until the information is consolidated, newly-learned material is vulnerable to forgetting—is perhaps most famously supported by the phenomenon of temporally graded retrograde amnesia. In a pattern precisely the opposite of normal forgetting, memory for recently-learned material is impaired, relative to memory for information learned long ago. Temporally graded retrograde amnesia is well documented in humans with lesions and disease of medial-temporal structures (e.g., Brown, 2002), and can be produced in animal models (e.g., Kim & Fanselow, 1992; Takehara et al., 2003; see Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001; Squire & Alvarez, 1995; for revie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 A Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to the Study of Memory
• 2 The Development of Infant Memory
• 3 Representational Flexibility in Infants and Young Children
• 4 Infant and Toddler Working Memory
• 5 Working Memory Development in Childhood
• 6 Development of Working Memory and Spatial Representation: How are They Related?
• 7 The Development of Prospective Memory during Childhood
• 8 The Development of Semantic Memory: The Role of Memory Strategies and Metacognition
• 9 Implicit Memory in Children: Moving Beyond Developmental Invariance
• 10 Autobiographical Memory: Early Onset and Developmental Course
• 11 Sociocultural Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory
• 12 Memory Development from Infancy to Childhood: Cross-cultural Perspectives
• 13 Children's Memory Development: Emotion, Distress, and Trauma
• 14 Memory Development and the Forensic Context
• 15 The Counterintuitive Course of False Memory Development During Childhood
• 16 Reflections and Future Directions
• Index