The Role of the Hippocampus in Early Memory for Words

项目概要 情景记忆，或者说记住过去事件的具体细节的能力，是人类的核心 经验，并与各个领域的学习和适应性功能有关。在典型的发展中 对于儿童来说，情景记忆会在婴儿期出现改善，并在幼儿期及以后得到改善。 尽管早期情景记忆能力出色，但大多数早期记忆都因婴儿失忆症而丧失， 个体无法回忆起生命最初两三年内发生的事件。内的发展过程 海马体被认为主要负责情景记忆的早期出现 儿童因婴儿失忆症而丧失早期记忆。然而，这些假设是基于 早期人类发展的非人类模型和体内研究受到了严重限制 获取神经影像数据的方法学挑战，特别是与任务相关的功能神经影像 数据，来自幼儿。 最近对成年人的研究强调，海马体参与了最初的认知能力的获得。 新词与其所指对象之间的任意关联，海马体的能力明显受损 健忘症。我们建议利用婴儿和幼儿卓越的单词学习技能来探索 单词记忆的神经基质是否可以用作早期情景记忆的标记。 拟议的研究将探索测试婴儿和儿童海马结构和功能的新方法。 18 至 30 个月大的幼儿，是情景记忆得到改善的时期，可以记忆数百个单词 学过，但婴儿失忆症却在起作用。 与公共卫生的相关性：健康的情景记忆为事件的出现和发生提供了基础。 自传体记忆的发展，自我从过去到未来的连续性，并与 智力能力和学术成就。情景记忆的发展即使在以下情况下也会受到损害： 轻度的后天性神经损伤、焦虑和抑郁等心理健康状况，以及 神经发育障碍；语言习得在许多疾病中也会受到损害 强调记忆和词汇发展的特征是理解适应性的关键 在不同儿童群体中发挥作用。

PROJECT SUMMARY Episodic memory, or the ability to remember past events with specific detail, is central to the human experience and is related to learning and adaptive functioning in a variety of domains. In typically developing children, episodic memory improves emerges during infancy and improves during early childhood and beyond. Despite remarkable early episodic memory skills, most early recollections are lost to infantile amnesia, individuals' inability to recall events occurred in the first 2 or 3 years of life. Developmental processes within the hippocampus are hypothesized to be primarily responsible for both the early emergence of episodic memory in children and the loss of early recollections due to infantile amnesia. However, these hypotheses are based on non-human models and in-vivo investigations in early human development have been significantly limited by the methodological challenge of acquiring neuroimaging data, particularly task-related functional neuroimaging data, from young children. Recent studies in adults have highlighted that the hippocampus is involved in the acquisition of the initially arbitrary association between new words and their referents, a capacity markedly impaired in hippocampal amnesia. We propose to leverage the remarkable word-learning skills in infants and toddlers to explore whether neural substrates of memory for words can be used as a marker of early episodic memory. The proposed research will explore new methods to test hippocampal structure and function in infants and toddlers ages 18 to 30 months, a period during which episodic memory improves, hundreds of words are being learned, but infantile amnesia operates. Relevance to Public Health: Healthy episodic memory provides a foundation for the emergence and development of autobiographical memory, continuity of self from past to future, and is associated with intellectual ability and academic achievement. The development of episodic memory is impaired following even mild forms of acquired neurological insult, mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and neurodevelopmental disorders; language acquisition is additionally impaired in a number of disorders underscoring that a characterization of memory and vocabulary development is key to understanding adaptive functioning in various populations of children.