The memory development in children becomes clear in the first 3 years of a child's life as they show progress in declarative memory. This increase continues into adolescence with major developments in short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory and autobiographical memories.
Recent research on memory development suggests that memory is declarative or explicit, probably present in infants who are even younger than two years. For example, a newborn who is less than 3 days old shows a preference for her own mother's voice.
Video Memory development
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Development
Declarative memory develops rapidly during the first 2 years of life; these age babies show evidence of cognitive development in many ways (eg, increased attention, language acquisition, increased knowledge). There is a difference in the development of explicit and implicit memory memories in infants. Implicit memory is controlled by early-growing memory systems in the brain that are present very early, and can be explained by early maturation of the striatum, cerebellum, and brain stem, all of which are involved in learning and implicit memory.
Explicit memory development depends on a growing memory system in the brain that reaches maturity between 8 and 10 months. Explicit memory relies heavily on structures in the medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex. Most brain systems are formed before birth, but dentate gyrus in hippocampal formation has about 70% of the cell number in adults.
A quick axillary amyloum in the central nervous system occurs during the first year of life which can dramatically improve the efficiency and speed of transmission in neurons. This may explain the higher processing rates of older infants as compared to younger ones.
Maps Memory development
Working Memory
According to Baddeley's working memory model, working memory consists of three parts. First is the central executive responsible for various regulatory functions including attention, action control, and problem solving. Second, the phonological loop, which is specific to the manipulation and retention of matter within a particular information domain. Finally, visuospatial sketches store material in terms of visual or spatial features. The strength of the relationship between the three components of working memory varies; central executives are closely related to both the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketches which are both independent of each other. Some evidence suggests a linear increase in working memory performance from 3-4 years old to adolescence.
Executive Center
In children 2-4, memory capacity constraints limit the process of complex understanding. However, as the child ages, it takes less processing that opens up more storage space for memory.
Phonological Loop
The evidence shows a linear increase in performance from age 4 to adolescence. Before about 7 years, the serial recall performance was mediated by a phonological store that was one component of the phonological loop. Preschoolers do not use subvocal training strategies to maintain rotting phonological representations in stores but instead they identify the visual features of an image to remember it. This is proven first by watching the children for clear signs of exercise (eg lip movement) and secondly if the child is given a picture that can be mentioned, no difference in retrieval is found for long versus short words. At the age of seven, children begin using the subvocal training process to maximize retention in phonological stores. As the development progresses, the nonauditory memory material is re-coded into phonological code suitable for the phonological loop whenever possible.
Visuospatial Sketchpad
Younger children (under age 5) may be more dependent than older children or adults using visuospatial sketches to support direct memory for visual materials. Older children adopt a verbal image recoding strategy whenever possible and also use a phonological loop to mediate the performance of "visual" memory tasks. Between the ages of 5 and 11, the range of visual memory increases substantially and at this point when adult performance levels are achieved.
Long Term Memory
Explicit memory becomes much better during the years of development. However, there is a small effect of age on implicit memory, which may be because implicit memory involves a more fundamental process than declarative memory that will make it less affected by cognitive abilities and the ability to develop children.
Baby
Infants aged 5 months or older can use emotions to influence their memory. However, at this age, the baby will be more likely to remember things that are marked by positive emotions. How researchers study the ability of infant memory in this age range is through measuring eye movements between test images presented. After conducting this preliminary round of testing, the researchers will conduct follow-up tests either 5 minutes later and one day later. The follow-up tests shown to infants include two geometric shapes: one from the original test, and a new form. Researchers can record how long the baby sees the images in a follow-up test and measures how long the baby looks at each shape. Babies are more likely to stare at the geometric shapes of the original test if they have been paired in a positive voice than if they were paired with a neutral or negative voice. This study shows that infants at this age will be able to better remember the shape and pattern of things if they are associated with positive emotions because the positivity will increase the interest and attention of the baby.
Pre-school Children
Babies as early as 7 months can distinguish conceptually between categories such as animals and vehicles. Although the concept of a baby may be raw by adult standards, they still allow babies to make a significant semantic difference. An example is a baby can distinguish between the belongings of the kitchen and the belongings of the bathroom. At the very least, these categories laid the groundwork for early knowledge development, organizing information in storage and influencing future coding. Infants from the age of 16 months may utilize their semantic knowledge in generalizations and inferences. This knowledge can also be used by older toddlers, aged 24 months, to facilitate the acquisition and storage of new information. Their knowledge of ordering causal events can be used to help remember the sequence of events.
Knowledge itself will not alter retention performance, but rather how well structured knowledge will change performance. Better retention is shown with information that has greater cohesion and more elaborative elements. Familiarity and repetition of experience can also affect the organization of information in storage for preschoolers and older children. Children who experienced events twice considering the event were better 3 months later than children who only experienced it once and showed the same results in 3 months compared to recall within 2 weeks after the experience.
School Children
The age difference in memory is associated with growing age in the knowledge base. What the child knows affects what he encoded, how the information is organized into storage, and how it is captured. The greater the background knowledge about the information to be encoded, the better the information is remembered. Because older children have more knowledge than younger children, older children work better than smaller children in most memory tasks. When the familiarity and meaningfulness of matter are equated across the ages, the difference in development in memory performance is no longer a factor.
The use of children's memory strategies and the development of metamemory skills also play a role in age-related changes in memory, especially in childhood. Knowledge affects memory by affecting retrieval, by facilitating the dissemination of activation between related items in memory and by facilitating the use of strategies. Knowledge also provides better information elaboration that can strengthen its storage in memory.
Episodic Memory
At school age, typical children demonstrate skills in remembering details of past experiences and in arranging those details into narrative forms with cohesion. Memories formed at this age and beyond are more likely to stand the test of time for many years and are remembered in adulthood, compared to previous memories. Young children can sometimes store information from certain episodes over a very long period of time, but the specific information a child has at a certain age is likely to survive for different periods of time unpredictable. It depends on the nature of memory events and individual differences in children such as gender, parent communication style, and language skills.
Autobiographic Memory
The amount of information that can be withdrawn depends on the age of the child at the time of the incident. Children at age 1-2 can remember personal events, though only in fragments when questioned several months later. The two-year-olds form an autobiographical memory and remember it for a few months at least.
Difficulties in assessing memory in children can be attributed to their level of language skills; this is because memory tests usually occur in the form of verbal reports. It is unclear whether the performance on the memory assessment is due to poor memory for the event or the inability to express what they remember in words. However, memory tests assessing performance with nonverbal photo recognition tests and behavior re-demonstrations showed that children had 27 months recall signs, compared with 33 months using a verbal recall test.
Children Amnesia
Infantile amnesia is a tendency to have some autobiographical memories from under 2-4. This can be attributed to a lack of memory training; young people are not involved in the exercise given the memorable information. There are two theoretical explanations for why this can happen; although they take a different approach, they are not mutually exclusive. Self-cognitive development is also considered by some to have an effect on the coding and storage of early memories.
Cognitive Self
Autobiographical memories can only begin to form once the baby has developed a sense of self to whom events of personal interest can occur. Evidence of self-flourishes towards the end of the second year of life, between 21 and 24 months. Cognitive self-development provides a new framework from which memory can be organized. With this cognitive advance, we see the emergence of autobiographical memories and the end of infantile amnesia.
The Influence of Social Culture
Language and culture play a central role in the early development of autobiographical memories. The way in which parents discuss the past with their children and how elaborative they are in reminiscence affects the way children encode memory. Children whose parents talk in detail about the past are given a wonderful opportunity to train their memories. The use of language by parents at the time of the event may also play a factor in how the child remembers the episode. Cultural differences in parenting style and parent-child relationships can contribute to an autobiographical memory at an early age.
Memory Strategy
A memory strategy is a way in which individuals can manage the information they are processing to improve future memory. A useful memory strategy may include but is not limited to verbal or mnemonic exercises. The use of memory strategies varies both in the type of strategy used and the effectiveness of strategies used in different age groups.
Metamemory
As children grow older, they show growing evidence of metamemory which is knowledge of their memories and how it works. There is strong evidence to suggest that greater awareness and knowledge about one's memory leads to increased use of memory strategies and greater memory levels.
In children under 7 years, the relationship between metamemory, strategy use, and recall is generally very weak or absent. This can be seen when comparing older children (over age 7) and preschoolers to sorting tasks in which children are asked to sort objects into united groups (eg animals) and try to remember them.
Preschoolers
Preschoolers use simple tactics to remember but do not use mental strategies and usually do not distinguish memory and perception. To remember objects, they tend to verbally name or visually examine items and use memory strategies intermittently or inconsistently even if they are aware of how they can improve memory. Memory strategies are used more consistently by children if they are reminded and taught to use them whenever they process something to remember.
Age 7 years
At the age of 7 years, awareness of the benefits of memory strategies in learning generally emerges. The goal is for children to recognize the benefits of using a memory strategy such as categorizing rather than just seeing or naming.
At this age, children spontaneously use exercises to improve short-term memory performance and retrieval strategies begin to be used spontaneously without the guidance of others.
End of Primary School
At the end of elementary school, children engage in the use of their own organizations and demonstrate the ability to impose semantic structures on items to remember in order to guide memory performance. For example, if a child packs their bags for school they can go through every part of their day and think of every item they need to pack. Children at this age understand the benefits of using memory strategies and use strategies such as categorization of searching or naming if they are instructed to think about learning strategies before learning.
Initial Youth
In early adolescence, children begin to use elaborative exercises which mean that items are not only remembered but processed more deeply. They also prefer to use memory strategies such as categorization rather than simple exercises, searching or naming and using this strategy without thinking about memory strategies before learning.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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