Poster #11 - Using story narratives to aid episodic memory

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Episodic memory involves recollection of personally experienced events tagged within a spatial and temporal context (i.e., what-where-when memory) and also involves mental time travel to reflect on past experiences and anticipate events in the future (Tulving, 2002). Episodic memory emerges by age 3 but is still fragile (Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011). Rudimentary episodic memory skills are evident in 3-year-olds, but only when tested on behavioral recall (Hayne & Imuta, 2011). In addition, 3-year-olds exhibit difficulty in episodic future thinking when tested using longer delays (i.e. 30 minutes; Scarf et al., 2011). Given that young children have trouble linking, organizing and recollecting the contextual details of an event, it is critical to examine the factors that promote binding the what-where-when and future-thinking components of episodic memory. A narrative is a sequence of actions that are linked together, often coherent with an explanation of how and why the actions occurred the way they did (Fivush, 2011). Although existing research shows that children’s use of narratives are linked to their event recall, few experimental studies have manipulated the use of a narrative. The present study examined the impact of binding events to a story narrative to aid episodic memory and episodic future thinking in 3-year-olds.

Data collection is currently ongoing, but currently a sample of five children have been recruited. Children were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions (a narrative condition or an explicit instruction condition). In both conditions, the child was told that they would be hiding objects with the experimenter together (Table 1). The critical difference between the two conditions was the presence or absence of a story narrative that ties the objects together into a cohesive memory. To elaborate, in the narrative condition, the child was told that they are looking for objects hidden by a pirate. In the explicit instruction condition, each child was told they are simply playing a game of hide-and-seek with the experimenter. Table 1 describes an outline of the hiding task and provides a sample script between the narrative and explicit conditions.

Children’s responses will be scored for the number of correct responses within each episodic memory component (i.e., order, room, object, location, and future item). In addition, two binding scores (ROL: room + object + location; ROLF: room + object + location + future) will also be calculated. Descriptives are displayed in Figure 1. Although data collection is in the preliminary stages, it appears that children performed similarly on the individual what, where, and when components of episodic memory. However, it appears that the narrative may have helped facilitate memory binding and the episodic future thinking component, although a larger sample will be recruited before any conclusions are drawn.

Authors

• Vinaya Rajan, University of the Sciences
  Presenting Author

• Nuwar Ahmed, University of the Sciences
  Non-Presenting Author