The best of both worlds: Mapping developmental changes in real-world memory to controlled assessments and neural maturation

• Applicant: Chi Ngo, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547294915

Memory enables us to preserve the specific instances of our past and amass knowledge that guides predictions of the future. Early in life, infants and toddlers excel at building general knowledge about the world. In stark contrast, their abilities to recollect specific past events are much fainter in the first 3 years of life and improves significantly between the ages of 4 and 8. To build an adaptive memory, we need to meet two complementary, but opposing, goals. One goal is to make appropriate generalizations based on recurrent patterns across many past events. The other goal is to remember the specifics of a particular instance without confusing it with other similar memories. How do children develop the necessary building blocks to support such memory functions? Contemporary neurocomputational theories in memory posit a set of processes within the brain that helps us accomplish both goals without a tradeoff. One process, termed pattern categorization, uses the common features cut-crossing many related experiences to make generalizations. In contrast, other processes support the abilities to remember specific instances. Of these, one is termed pattern separation, which helps store memories distinctively, even if they share similar contents with other experiences. Another process, termed pattern completion, retrieves a past event when we are reminded with some of its parts. These processes rely on different brain regions and their interactions, each of which develops at their own pace. To date, our knowledge on how such processes develop within the same child over time is extremely limited. Further, we do not know how such developments translate children’s memories for everyday life events, in part due the dearth of data on children’s real-world memory abilities. This proposal will apply theoretical predictions to investigate how developmental changes in memory processes measured in the lab are mapped onto the development of real-world memory abilities. In a three-pronged approach, we will first continuously track within-child changes in memory abilities associated with pattern separation, completion, and categorization, using controlled lab-based assessments. Second, we will simultaneously measure the accuracy with which these children recollect their real-life events. And third, we will employ neuroimaging methods to test theory-driven predictions of how changes in the brain relate to children’s memory development. Each component of this approach will be administered in the same group of children at 4 time points over the course of 5 years, spanning ages 4 to 10. This integrated dataset will be the first of its kind, and is crucial for our understanding of how different building blocks of memory, and their interactions, unfold over the course of childhood. Most excitingly, it directly applies contemporary theories to an age-old question of why early childhood memories are vulnerable to retrieval inaccessibility later in life.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups