Charting the neural bases of episodic specificity and generalization in development

• Applicant: Dr. Chi Ngo, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465410548

Memory is important for everyday life functioning. We rely on it to access our past, to build knowledge about the world, and to predict the future. To build an adaptive memory system, we need two ways of remembering our past: one for creating knowledge based on the overlap among similar experiences via generalization, and the other for remembering the details of specific events via processes of episodic specificity. Early in life, children have poor memories fordetails of specific events; yet at the same time are quite good at remembering the common reoccurrences in the environment. Over the course of early and middle childhood (~ages 4 to 8), children’s abilities to remember the specific events improve substantially. This observation emerged from different lines of research, inviting the prediction that the ability to build general knowledge may develop before the ability to preserve the specifics of individual episodes. Here, our proposed research aims to directly examine whether generalization develops before episodic specificity by testing both capacities simultaneously in the same group of children from age 4 to 8. Further, we will test whether changes in the brain (described by gray matter volume and white matter connectivity) implicated in generalization and episodic specificity predict how well children perform on remembering the generalities and the specifics of past experiences at a later age.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants