Developments in extension of knowledge through integration of separate episodes

描述（由申请人提供）：像大多数心理现象一样，学习和记忆受到许多因素的影响，并随着发展发生明显的变化。此外，它们还会相互影响：孩子过去学到的东西会影响（尽管不能决定）他/她记住的东西，孩子从一段经历中记住的东西会限制他/她从中学到的东西。虽然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知识库的问题一直不是发展文献关注的焦点。补充问题的相关性——儿童如何在记忆中保持单独的事件——已经被承认了一段时间，并得到了相当多的关注。然而，关于儿童如何将个别事件及时联系起来，从而为一般知识库的发展做出贡献的基本问题，在很大程度上尚未得到探索。当孩子们进入学龄阶段，发现自己所处的环境要求他们整合在不同时间和不同环境中获得的信息时，这个问题尤为重要。R03 HD57291支持的初步研究表明，在最佳测试环境下，4岁和6岁的儿童在发作之间整合。本研究的扩展有三个具体目的：1)研究学龄前和学龄早期儿童在更接近于模仿他们在教育和偶然学习环境中遇到的情况下的融合与年龄相关的变化。2)测试预期会增加或减少在单独事件中所学信息整合概率的因素。3)研究通过整合自我生成知识的可能后果——相对于明确教授的信息——包括更强的记忆力和更强的抗干扰能力。在4岁、6岁和8岁儿童的7个实验中，我们追求这三个目标。之所以选择这个年龄段，是因为正是在这个年龄段，正式学校教育的要求开始显现，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.