Developments in extension of knowledge through integration of separate episodes

描述(申请人提供)：与大多数心理现象一样，学习和记忆受到许多因素的影响，并随着发展而发生显著变化。此外，他们彼此互动：孩子在过去学到的东西会影响(尽管不决定)S的记忆，而孩子从一次经历中记住的东西会限制S从经验中学到的东西。尽管学习和记忆密切相关，但儿童如何从他们经历和记忆的个别事件中建立起知识基础的问题，在发展文学中并不是关注的焦点。这个补充问题的相关性--儿童如何在记忆中保持单独的情节--已经被承认了一段时间，并受到了相当大的关注。然而，儿童如何及时将个别事件联系起来，从而为发展一般知识库做出贡献，这一根本问题在很大程度上还没有得到探索。这一问题尤其相关，因为儿童进入学龄期，发现自己处于要求他们综合在不同时间和不同背景下获得的信息的环境中。R03 HD57291支持的初步研究表明，4岁和6岁的儿童在最佳测试环境下可以在两次发作之间进行整合。这项研究的拟议扩展有三个具体目标：1)考察学龄前和早期学龄儿童在更接近于他们在教育和附带学习情景中遇到的情况下融入方面的年龄相关变化。2)测试在不同事件中学习到的信息的整合概率预期增加或减少的因素。3)研究通过整合自我生成知识的可能后果--相对于明确传授的信息--包括更健壮的记忆和更强的抗干扰性。这三个目标是在7个实验中实现的，这些实验涉及4、6和8岁的儿童。之所以选择年龄范围，是因为正是在这段时间里，引入了正规教育的要求，包括期望孩子们在一个学期的过程中积累信息，并将其整合起来。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Like most psychological phenomena, learning and memory are influenced by many factors and undergo pronounced changes with development. Moreover, they interact with one another: what a child has learned in the past influences (though does not determine) what s/he remembers, and what a child remembers from an experience constrains what s/he learns from it. Although learning and memory are intimately linked, the question of how children build up a knowledge base from the individual events that they experience and remember has not been a focus of attention in the developmental literature. The relevance of the complementary question-how children keep individual episodes separate in memory- has been acknowledged for some time and has received considerable attention. Yet the fundamental question of how children connect individual episodes in time so that they contribute to the development of a general knowledge base has gone largely unexplored. The question is especially relevant as children enter the school years and find themselves in settings that demand that they integrate information that has been acquired at different times and in different contexts. Initial studies supported by R03 HD57291 demonstrated that 4- and 6-year-old children integrate between episodes under optimal testing circumstances. The proposed extension of this research has three specific aims: 1) To examine age-related changes in integration by preschool and early school-age children under conditions that more closely mimic those they encounter in educational and incidental learning situations. 2) To test factors expected to increase versus decrease the probability of integration of information learned in separate episodes. 3) To examine possible consequences of self-generation of knowledge through integration- relative to information explicitly taught-including more robust retention and greater resistance to interference. These three aims are pursued in 7 experiments with children 4, 6, and 8 years of age. The age range was selected because it is during this time that the demands of formal schooling are introduced, including the expectation that children will accumulate information over the course of a term, and integrate it.