Representing and recalling the past are fundamental capacities that most adults take for granted. Traditionally, it was thought that a variety of deficits rendered children under three incapable of sharing this feature of mental life. Contrary to the assumption that young children are unable to store and retrieve memories, it now is apparent that by late in the first and throughout the second and year of rife, developments in explicit recognition and recall are well underway. What remains largely unexplored are age-related changes in the basic parameters that underlie these developments. Also relatively neglected is what happens to early memories as the mnemonic system that would retain them matures. To address these issues, the goals of the proposed research are to (1) Investigate early developments in long-term explicit memory processes. There is increasing evidence that the neural substrate that supports explicit memories over the long-term begins to coalesce in the second half of the first year of life. Variability in Long-term memory in this period is consistent with this suggestion. Behavioral and electrophysiological investigations of the source(s) of variability, and thus of the generators of developmental change, are the focus of 5 experiments (2) Examine the vulnerability of memory traces over the short term. Nonverbal tests of explicit memory have revealed that young children remember aspects of events over significant periods of time. However, rapid forgetting in the hours, days, and weeks after encoding also is in evidence. lnvestigation of short-term forgetting, and its likely implications for long-term memory, are the subjects of three experiments. (3) Establish the course of development of episodic memory. Whereas quite young children retain explicit memories over long delays, it is not clear that their memories a re-episodic in nature. In fight of evidence of involvement of frontal structures in retrieval of episodic features, and of protracted development of frontal structures, asymmetrical development of general event memory and specific episodic memory is to be expected. lnvestigations of developments in memory for specific episodes are the focus of two experiments. (4) Examine developments in autobiographical memory. Preschool children evidence substantial competence in recollection of personally significant events. These findings deepen the mystery of why early memories seem, after childhood, to disappear. Investigations of the long-term fate of early memories, and of the impact of early determinants on later auto-biographical reports, are the subjects of the final three experiments.
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