Explicit memory depends heavily on structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus and the parahippocampal cortex.
Much of the brain system is formed before birth, however the dentate gyrus within the hippocampal formation has about 70% of the number of cells in adults.
[6] Rapid myelination of axons within the central nervous system occurs during first year of life which can dramatically increase the efficiency and speed of transmission in neurons.
First is the central executive which is responsible for a range of regulatory functions including attention, the control of action, and problem solving.
The strength of the relationships between the three components of working memory vary; the central executive is strongly linked with both the phonological loop as well as the visuospatial sketchpad which are both independent of each other.
[1] Initially Professor in Psychology Robert V. Kail and Professor Meghan Saweikis inferred that the central executive had an important role of storing some information and that the central executive reinforced long-term memory and has the potential to designate resources for focusing, dividing and switching attention.
Preschool aged children do not use a subvocal rehearsal strategy to maintain decaying phonological representations in the store but instead they identify visual features of pictures in order to remember them.
This is evident first by watching children for overt sign of rehearsal (for example lip movement) and second if the child is given nameable pictures, there are no differences in retrieval found for long versus short words.
Older children adopt a strategy of verbally recoding pictures where possible and also use the phonological loop to mediate performance of the “visual” memory task.
Between the ages of 5 and 11, visual memory span increases substantially and it is at this point when adult levels of performance are reached.
In his initial paper, Professor of Psychology Alan Baddeley detailed what he believes to be the biological functioning, location, and purpose of the episodic buffer.
[1] The way that researchers study the memory capabilities of infants in this age range is through measuring eye movements between test images presented.
[24] At the very least, these categories lay a foundation for early knowledge development, organizing information in storage and influence future encoding.
When familiarity and meaningfulness of material were equated across age, developmental differences in memory performance was no longer a factor.
As individuals age, the hippocampus appears to begin to lose its ability to make connections to life events and memory.
This depends on the nature of the memory event and individual differences in the child such as gender, parental style of communication, and language ability.
[28] One of the most important aspects of episodic memory according to Psychologist Endel Tulving (1985, 1999) is the element of the individual to cognitively travel to both the past and the future.
In regards to sex they found that women tend to have a slightly lower decrease rate of Episodic Memory than men, -.12 compared to -.14 units.
Professor Leslie Rollins et al.(2018), [36] showed that particularly bad experiences tended to degrade, to be forgotten, and were more related to difficulties remembering than positive memories.
[40][41][42] Autobiographical memories can only begin to form after infants have developed a sense of self to whom events having personal significance can occur.
The manner in which parents discuss the past with their children and how elaborative they are in reminiscing affects how the child encodes the memory.
Cultural differences in parenting styles and parent-child relationships can contribute to autobiographical memory at an early age.
[46] Memory strategies are ways in which individuals can organize the information that they are processing in order to enhance recall in the future.
In a study by Guerrero Sastoque et al., they discovered that this could be the result of changes in the types of memory strategies used to compensate with their slower recall ability.
In order to remember objects, they tend to verbally name or visually inspect items and use memory strategies intermittently or inconsistently even if they are aware of how they can improve recall.
[54] Once this skill has been learned or there has been significant progression, children in this age steadily become better at remembering to do things in the future (e.g., throwing out the garbage, closing the bathroom door or doing homework).
[54] Children in this stage of their lives often have an attention shifting episodes in which enable to portion of the memory that was expiring to activate once more, not allowing them to forget.
[54] In late elementary school, children engage in self-directed use of organization and demonstrate the ability to impose a semantic structure on the to-be-remembered items to guide memory performance.
[55] For instance, when a child is asked to memorize a song or a poem the teacher will sing or read aloud,[55] essentially comprehending the meaning of certain words and forming a connection is what is generating a student's mind.
[55] In early adolescence, children begin to use elaborative rehearsal meaning that items are not simply kept in mind but rather are processed more deeply.