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Kids are surprisingly adultlike in their memory recall, 91��ɫ research shows

egamulin — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:00:44 +0000

TORONTO, Jan. 27 2023 – Planning a trip to the zoo this weekend? Why is it that after a visit, a four-year-old might remember seeing a lion, a tiger, and a bear, while a 10-year-old might also recall seeing a giraffe, a kangaroo, a pygmy hippo, a Komodo dragon, a ring-tailed lemur, and maybe even a West African dwarf crocodile? shows that while older kids have a superior memory, children as young as four show evidence of the sophisticated technique known as ‘temporal clustering,’ when recalling information.

“We often underestimate what children are capable of,” says from the Faculty of Health and Director of . “Our study — looking at kids not in a research lab, but out ‘in the wild’ — shows these universal memory properties are established at a very early age.”

The study’s authors, who also included 91��ɫ PhD students Lina Deker and Mark Christopher Adkins, and 91��ɫ undergraduate student Puneet Kaur Parmar, looked at children who took part in a week-long summer camp at the Toronto Zoo – a deliberate choice for Pathman, who has previously conducted research at various science centres and museums. “When we can get out into the world and capture real-life events to answer our research question, it helps to bolster what we're finding and make it more ecologically valid,” Pathman explains.

The children were on set schedules for visiting different exhibits, so the researchers knew which animals the kids saw when. The kids were divided into groups of four- to five-year-olds (defined as being in early childhood), six- to seven-year-olds (middle childhood) and eight- to 10-year-olds (late childhood). At the end of the week, the children were asked one simple question: ‘can you tell me all the animals you saw this week?’

“We were interested in how many animals children of different ages recalled. We found the expected pattern that older children recalled more animals than younger children. But we were especially interested in the order of their recall. Were children showing temporal clustering? And we found that they were.”

Temporal clustering — the idea that people remember things in groupings based on the timing of those experiences – is a well-documented process in adults. Pathman and her team have discovered that children as young as four search for memories using this same process.

“If a child’s recall response was ‘ostrich, gorilla,’ those would be animals that they saw in different spatial and temporal contexts. That is not an example of temporal clustering. But if the child said ‘ostrich, zebra’ — these animals were experienced together, so the response would show temporal clustering.”

Creating memories in space and time relies on a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Pathman says current research suggests this part of the brain continues to develop later into childhood than previously thought.

This study supports earlier findings by Pathman and others suggesting there is a jump in memory around age seven or eight and older kids do not display much difference in their memory processes compared to adults – especially when that memory is tested in a more naturalistic environment like a trip to the zoo, rather than a lab setting.

“I think a lot of attention has been paid to infancy, and the emergence of memory, but there's something that's happening in middle-to-late childhood that's really fascinating.”

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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Study shows why younger children remember details but struggle with order of events

roshanp — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 13:33:42 +0000

Findings add to knowledge of children’s eyewitness testimony

TORONTO, March 17, 2021��–��Children between four and five years old find it more difficult to remember time and the sequence of events than older children, a study by psychology researchers at 91��ɫ shows. This is expected to be a particularly important finding as more children could be asked to testify about what happened inside their homes during the pandemic.

“Did I see John before or after I went to the park?” “Who came into my room first?” Researchers say children aged eight to 10 years old can answer these types of questions with better accuracy than younger children.

In cases of child maltreatment and abuse, children are often the only witnesses, other than the accused. That is why thousands of children participate in forensic interviews or testify in courts every year.

“There are��reports that COVID-related lockdowns and school closures have resulted in more cases of maltreatment and abuse.��So around the world we expect an increase in future court cases, and an increase in the number of children that are interviewed or asked to testify about events that happened inside the home during the pandemic,” says senior author Thanujeni (Jeni) Pathman, assistant professor, Department of Psychology at 91��ɫ. “It’s possible there will be even more need to rely on the testimony of child eyewitnesses, so understanding what children can remember and��report, including when past events occurred, is important.”

The study looked at��how well children remember the order that past events occurred, to better understand why younger children have a more difficult time being accurate compared to older kids or adults. Previous research has found that there are drastic improvements in how well children remember past events across childhood, but the development of temporal memory − memory for ‘when’− is especially slow to develop.�� Researchers wanted to know why this is so.

In the study, 127 children took part in a week-long summer camp in 2018 at the Toronto Zoo where they experienced unique and fun events each day, including visits to particular animal exhibits.�� Children were in three age groups: four to five-year-olds, six to seven-year-olds, and eight to 10-year-olds. Researchers tested the children’s memory for the order of events they experienced across the week with questions like, “Which did you do first, visit the polar bear or the giraffe?”

The study found that the two older age groups remembered the order of the zoo events.�� Six to seven-year-olds were not as accurate as the eight to 10-year-olds, but both groups were accurate overall. This is in contrast to the youngest children, in the four- to five-year-old group, who were not accurate about order or timing of events – even though they remembered many other details about events from the zoo.��In order to determine the precise mental processes that children may be using to help them answer the question, researchers varied the time between the events in the question.�� For some questions, the two events happened close in time, making it more difficult, and for other events the two events were farther apart, making it less difficult.

“When adults do tasks like these, they show a boost in memory when the two events are farther apart, pinpointing a particular type of process used to explain how adults remember time.�� We found that only the oldest age group showed this boost which means that only they were benefiting from the use of this particular process that adults use.”

Researchers say these results help explain why there are age-related improvements and why memory for time shows continued improvements so late in development.

The final version of this study is published online in the journal�� today.

91��ɫ��is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.��

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Media Contact:��

Anjum Nayyar, 91��ɫ Media Relations, cell 437 242 1547,��anayyar@yorku.ca

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Don’t know what day it is anymore? Memory expert explains that ‘Groundhog Day’ feeling

roshanp — Thu, 21 May 2020 12:49:18 +0000

TORONTO, May 21, 2020��–As days of social isolation from our family, friends and work colleagues drag on, so does our sense of time. The monotony of our daily routines in this new normal may, for some, feel like a scene out of the movie Groundhog Day, with one day seeming no different than the next.

There’s a reason our brains are processing these COVID-19 days the way they are, says Shayna Rosenbaum in 91��ɫ’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. ��Professor and 91��ɫ Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Health and core member of the Vision Science to Applications (VISTA) program, Rosenbaum studies episodic memories and the brain’s ability to process time.

“We tend to encode meaningful events into memories, and these are typically defined by boundaries between events,” says Rosenbaum. “Without these kinds of boundaries it's very difficult to have the feeling that there are divisions within our day. The experience of the pandemic doesn't seem to have the same boundaries or divisions as other life events.”

You can think of a day as being made up of multiple episodes and these are defined by time and space, says Rosenbaum. “But when you're experiencing different types of routines, and little changes from one day to the next, it's really hard to be able to reconstruct the details belonging to a specific happening on a particular day.”

This may also impact our ability to remember the details of the pandemic once it’s over. “Because there are so many overlapping details relating to the pandemic itself, it's going to tax our ability to separate the details and encode memories as unique,” she says.

“It's very likely that even if we have no difficulty extracting the generalities of the pandemic, it will be difficult for us to retrieve specific details because they might not have been encoded in the first place.”

Rosenbaum is available for interviews to speak about:

How the brain helps us reconstruct details of events and gives us a sense of time
How this sense of time dragging on can impact mental health, exacerbate anxiety or depression and impact seniors
Tips to better manage our days and feel more in control of time

Find out more about how 91��ɫ is creating positive change in the COVID-19 pandemic��.

91��ɫ champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni.

Media contact:
Anjum Nayyar, 91��ɫ Media Relations, cell 437-242-1547,��anayyar@yorku.ca

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