Development of Hippocampal Binding in Memory: An investigation Linking Rodents and Humans
Episodic memory (EM), the ability to remember the past with specific details, is a fundamental aspect of cognition. EM improves substantially during development and its implications are far reaching in predicting children’s academic outcomes. However, the exact mechanisms underlying age-related improvements in EM are still poorly understood. Particularly, it is unclear to what extent binding, the linking of separate elements of an encountered episode into a cohesive unit, contributes to age-related improvement in memory. Binding depends on regions within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) of the brain. Research in this field faces the obstacle that measuring memory in young children is challenging and there is no measurement task that differentially engages binding in an unambiguous way. Together with Dr. Emma Wood (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Rosamund Langston (University of Dundee), we will address this problem by adapting a task from the animal literature that clearly delineates levels of binding that are dependent on different regions within the MTL of rodents. By aligning the experimental setups between human and animal studies, this interdisciplinary project will be the first to gauge age trajectories of binding from early childhood to young adulthood across species.
This study is funded by a Collaborative Research Grant from the Carnegie Trust.
