Childhood memory
The experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving refers to memory as “mental time travel”, a process unique to humans.
[1] Childhood memory research is relatively recent, having gained significant amounts of scientific interest within the last two decades.
[1] Previous research presupposed that children remember pieces of information from specific events but generally do not keep episodic memories.
Another older hypothesis that has been thrown into question is that of the prominent psychologists Daniel Schacter (1974) and Ulrich Neisser (1962), who hypothesized that memories are forgotten because cognitive schemas change between childhood and adulthood, meaning that information is lost with an adult's reconstruction of childhood events because present (adult) schemas are not suitable.
[1] Recent data suggest that a preschooler's schemas are not dramatically different from the older child's or the adult's, meaning that the ways of representing and interpreting reality do not change markedly from childhood to adulthood.
[1] For example, a child may not show remarkable memory for events that an adult would see as truly novel, such as the birth of a sibling, or a plane trip to visit relatives.
There is a long-lasting improvement in autobiographical memory in children whose mothers used an elaborative style of conversation after experiencing an event with the child.
One study found that older adolescents and females perform better on both episodic autobiographical memory and memory for everyday events, given that females tend to provide more emotional, accurate, vivid, and detailed recollections, although conditions of high retrieval support (probing questions) reduced this sex difference.
According to dual-coding theory, recognition of a memory stimulus can be studied via two cognitive mechanisms: recollection and familiarity.
Recollection is context-dependent on the details incidental to encoding of a target memory, and is related to the cognitive feeling of "remembering" something.
[7] Anterior medial prefrontal cortex, lateral parietal / temporal regions, hippocampus According to a study by Riggins et al.(2009), observations lend support to age-related increases in contextual memories.
[6] Recollection memory for details of individual objects is related to heightened activity in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal/temporal regions.
[8] Kindergarten teachers often describe self-discipline and attentional control in children as even more valuable in the learning environment than knowledge of the school material.
[8] Working memory (mentally holding and manipulating information) and inhibitory control (the ability to resist distractions) can predict math and reading scores from preschool through to high school.
[8] One way of mitigating executive control problems is to alter the learning environment by implementing smaller class sizes or relaxing settings, which will improve working memory performance.
[8] A third method draws from a series of studies in 2004-2005 (Klingberg et al.) which demonstrated improvement in children with working memory deficits, using training via computer games.
[8] Techniques have been developed to improve memory by directing attention to internal and external experiences as they occur in the present.
[11] This has been used in the health care industry to help individuals overcome anxiety and other problems that interfere with memory retrieval in adults.
[11] Children may show decreased symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and aggressive behaviour along with improved memory in classrooms and in sports settings.
Nonetheless, these memory gains were unexpected, and might lend credence to the idea that operative development can be facilitated by presenting a stimulus that the child can generalize to his or her environment.
[9] Relaxation can be induced with music and odors, which cue involuntary memory on both free recall and recognition tasks.
Cassaday specifically used lemon and lavender odors to induce a calm learning environment which was later reinstated for retrieval tasks.
[9] Children can benefit from consistent learning environments that support less anxious states for encoding and retrieval of test material.
Training on an instrument results in stronger development of the left temporal lobe, which is linked to verbal processing.
Procedural memory requires the involvement of the central executive in following verbal instruction while staying visually aware of the environment, ignoring distraction.
In one study, participation in sports was found to improve working memory through the co-activation of the motor and cognitive systems, specifically the cerebellum and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
[18] Finally, the use of pictures is an elaboration technique that enhances mental visual representations as a type of priming for later memory retrieval.
[19] Time-based prospective memory develops between 7 and 12 years of age as children make more efficient use of external reminders.
Neural input streams from the frontal lobe become increasingly proficient as a child reaches adolescence and progresses into adulthood.
Young adults showed an improved prospective memory performance relative to teenagers, likely because the executive functions associated with the prefrontal cortex are among the last to mature.
