Episodic and Semantic Autobiographical Memory and Everyday Memory during Late Childhood and Early Adolescence

Few studies have examined both episodic and semantic autobiographical memory (AM) performance during late childhood and early adolescence. Using the newly developed Children’s Autobiographical Interview (CAI), the present study examined the effects of age and sex on episodic and semantic AM and everyday memory in 182 children and adolescents. Results indicated that episodic and semantic AM both improved between 8 and 16 years of age; however, age-related changes were larger for episodic AM than for semantic AM. In addition, females were found to recall more episodic AM details, but not more semantic AM details, than males. Importantly, this sex difference in episodic AM recall was attenuated under conditions of high retrieval support (i.e., the use of probing questions). The ability to clearly visualize past events at the time of recollection was related to children’s episodic AM recall performance, particularly the retrieval of perceptual details. Finally, similar age and sex effects were found between episodic AM and everyday memory ability (e.g., memory for everyday activities). More specifically, older participants and females exhibited better episodic AM and everyday memory performance than younger participants and males. Overall, the present study provides important new insight into both episodic and semantic AM performance, as well as the relation between episodic AM and everyday memory, during late childhood and adolescence

Dissociations of egocentric and allocentric spatial memory, evidence from aging

grantor: University of TorontoAn exploration of the animal neuropsychological, and cognitive literature suggests that there are separate representations dealing with egocentric and allocentric space. Egocentric representations reference object location to an individuals body coordinates, while allocentric representations reference location relative to other coordinates. The dissociation of these representational systems has been found in nonmemory and memory paradigms, with the strongest evidence for dissociations found for memory in animal and patient, and human infant populations. There has been some suggestion that egocentric spatial memory is spared in aging, while allocentric spatial memory declines. To overcome the difficulty of unmatched task complexity in earlier studies, we measured egocentric and allocentric spatial recall of young and elderly subjects in eight experiments, using paradigm that attempted to match task complexity as closely as possible between the two types of tasks. Paradigms included of landmarks, configurations, and routes, in order to provide converging evidence for our expected dissociation. We also included two nonmemory tasks in a separate experiment to determine if the pattern of dissociation was common to all egocentric and allocentric tasks. Our results showed that older adults tended to perform poorly in allocentric tasks that involved recall of object locations, but performed well on such egocentric tasks relative to young adults. There were some exceptions to the overall pattern of results, but these were found to be limited to nonrecall measures, and in one recall experiment in which the results could be explained by context effects. The finding of declines in allocentric spatial recall across tasks suggests that these tests tap into a common system which is likely to be centred in the hippocampus, with connections to frontal and parietal areas subserving nonmemory task components. An alternative explanation in terms of changes in egocentric and allocentric processing with age is also presented, the differences between task performance being due to the amount of elaborative encoding required by the tasks. Directions for future research suggest applications to patient populations and use of neuroimaging to clarify neural correlates of our recall tasks.Ph.D