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，并随着发展而发生显著变化。此外，它们还相互作用：一个孩子在过去学到的东西会影响（虽然并不决定）他/她记得什么，而孩子从一次经历中记住的东西限制了他/她从中学到的东西。尽管学习和记忆密切相关，儿童如何从他们经历和记忆的个别事件中建立知识基础的问题，发展文学补充问题的相关性--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，儿童如何及时地将各个事件联系起来，从而促进一般知识基础的发展，这一基本问题在很大程度上尚未得到探索。这个问题特别重要，因为儿童进入学校，发现自己所处的环境要求他们整合在不同时间和不同背景下获得的信息。由R03 HD57291支持的初步研究表明，在最佳测试环境下，4岁和6岁的儿童在两次发作之间整合。本研究的扩展有三个具体目标：1）在更接近模拟他们在教育和附带学习情境中遇到的条件下，研究学龄前和学龄早期儿童在整合中与年龄相关的变化。2)测试预期增加与减少在单独事件中学习到的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-包括更强大的保留和更大的抗干扰性。这三个目标是追求在7个实验与儿童4，6和8岁。之所以选择这个年龄段，是因为正是在这段时间里，人们提出了接受正规教育的要求，包括期望儿童在一个学期中积累信息并加以整合。

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.