Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Our capacity to form and retrieve episodic memories improves over childhood but declines in old age. Understanding these changes requires decomposing episodic memory into its components: (1) mnemonic discrimination of similar people, objects and contexts, and (2) relational binding of these components. We designed novel memory tasks to assess these component processes involving animations that are appropriate across the lifespan (ages 4 - 80 in our sample). In Experiment 1, we assessed mnemonic discrimination of objects as well as relational binding in a common task format. Both components follow an inverted U-shaped curve across age but were positively correlated only in the aging group. In Experiment 2, we examined mnemonic discrimination of context and its effect on relational binding. Relational memory in low-similarity contexts showed robust gains between the ages of 4 and 6, and 6-year-olds performed similarly to adults. In contrast, relational memory in high-similarity contexts showed more protracted development, with 4- and 6-year-olds both performing worse than young adults and not differing from each other. Relational memory in both context conditions declined in aging. As in Experiment 1, performances in low- and high-similarity contexts were strongly related only in the older adults. This multi-process approach provides important theoretical insights into lifespan changes in episodic memory.