Building Up and Wearing Down Episodic Memory: Mnemonic Discrimination and Relational Binding.

Our capacity to form and retrieve episodic memories improves over childhood but declines in old age. Understanding these changes requires decomposing episodic memory into its components. Two such components are (a) mnemonic discrimination of similar people, objects, and contexts, and (b) relational binding of these elements. We designed novel memory tasks to assess these component processes using animations that are appropriate across the life span (ages 4-80 in our sample). In Experiment 1, we assessed mnemonic discrimination of objects as well as relational binding, in a common task format. Both components follow an inverted U-shaped curve across age but were positively correlated only in the aging group. In Experiment 2, we examined mnemonic discrimination of context and its effect on relational binding. Relational memory in low-similarity contexts showed robust gains between the ages of 4 and 6, whereas 6-year-olds performed similarly to adults. In contrast, relational memory in high-similarity contexts showed more protracted development, with 4- and 6-year-olds both performing worse than young adults and not differing from each other. Relational memory in both context conditions declined in aging. This multiprocess approach provides important theoretical insights into life span changes in episodic memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]