Occlusions at event boundaries during encoding have a negative effect on infant memory

The Development of Flexible Problem Solving: An Integrative Approach

Flexible problem solving, the ability to deal with currently goal-irrelevant information that may have been goal-relevant in previous, similar situations, plays a prominent role in cognitive development and has been repeatedly investigated in developmental research. However, this research, spanning from infancy to the school years, lacks a unifying framework, obscuring the developmental timing of flexible problem solving. Therefore, in this review paper, previous findings are gathered, organized, and integrated under a common framework to unveil how and when flexible problem solving develops. It is showed that the development of flexible problem solving coincides with increases in executive functions, that is, inhibition, working memory and task switching. The analysis of previous findings shows that dealing with goal-irrelevant, non-salient information received far more attention than generalizing in the presence of goal-irrelevant, salient information. The developmental timing of the latter can only be inferred from few transfer studies, as well as executive functions, planning and theory of mind research, to highlight gaps in knowledge and sketch out future research directions. Understanding how transfer in the presence of seemingly relevant but truly irrelevant information develops has implications for well-balanced participation in information societies, early and lifespan education, and investigating the evolutionary trajectory of flexible problem solving.

6-, 10-, and 12-month-olds remember complex dynamic events across 2 weeks

Whereas infants' ability to remember simple static material (e.g., pictures) has been documented extensively, we know surprisingly little about infants' memory of dynamic events (i.e., events unfolding in time) in the first year after birth. Although there is evidence to suggest that infants show some kind of sensitivity toward complex dynamic events (i.e., events involving agents and a storyline) as indicated by visual engagement in the first year after birth, 16- to 18-month-olds are hitherto the youngest infants documented to remember such material. Using a visual paired-comparison (VPC) task, in Experiment 1 we examined 6-, 10-, and 12-month-olds' (N = 108) ability to encode and remember cartoons involving complex dynamic events across 2 weeks. Results showed that all age groups remembered these cartoons. To investigate further the role of a complex storyline, in Experiment 2 we assessed the memory of 107 infants of the same age groups for similar cartoons but without coherent storyline information by scrambling the temporal presentation of the information in the cartoons. The results showed that the two youngest age groups did not remember this version. To our knowledge, this is the first experiment to document memory for such complex material in young infants using VPC.

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

How infants experience the world is fundamental to understanding their cognition and development. A key principle of adult experience is that, despite receiving continuous sensory input, we perceive this input as discrete events. Here we investigate such event segmentation in infants and how it differs from adults. Research on event cognition in infants often uses simplified tasks in which (adult) experimenters help solve the segmentation problem for infants by defining event boundaries or presenting discrete actions/vignettes. This presupposes which events are experienced by infants and leaves open questions about the principles governing infant segmentation. We take a different, data-driven approach by studying infant event segmentation of continuous input. We collected whole-brain functional MRI (fMRI) data from awake infants (and adults, for comparison) watching a cartoon and used a hidden Markov model to identify event states in the brain. We quantified the existence, timescale, and organization of multiple-event representations across brain regions. The adult brain exhibited a known hierarchical gradient of event timescales, from shorter events in early visual regions to longer events in later visual and associative regions. In contrast, the infant brain represented only longer events, even in early visual regions, with no timescale hierarchy. The boundaries defining these infant events only partially overlapped with boundaries defined from adult brain activity and behavioral judgments. These findings suggest that events are organized differently in infants, with longer timescales and more stable neural patterns, even in sensory regions. This may indicate greater temporal integration and reduced temporal precision during dynamic, naturalistic perception.

Effects of spatial boundaries on episodic memory development

Children's spatial mapping starts out particularly sensitive to 3D wall-like boundaries and develops over early childhood to flexibly include other boundary types. This study investigated whether spatial boundaries influence children's episodic memory, as in adults, and whether this effect is modulated by boundary type. Eighty-one Korean children (34 girls, 36-84 months old) re-enacted a sequence of three discrete hiding events within a space containing one of three boundaries: 3D wall, aligned objects, or 2D line. Children's memory of events occurring on one side of the boundary developed earlier than those that crossed the boundary. At first, this interaction only applied to the 3D wall and extended to other boundary types with age, suggesting that children's changing spatial representations influence their episodic memory development.

Predicting explicit memory for meaningful cartoons from visual paired comparison in infants and toddlers

We tested the memory of 18-, 33-, and 39-month-olds (N = 120) for dynamic stimulus material (simple cartoons) after 6 months in a visual paired comparison (VPC) task. We also tested the explicit recognition memory (ERM) for the same material. Only the oldest age group (39-month-olds) showed a significant visual (familiarity) preference at the test. Similarly, only the oldest group reliably chose the correct cartoon in the ERM test. Data from the VPC and ERM tasks did not correlate in any age group. However, we suggested a novel score (coined ΔVPC) measuring how much visual preference changes during the test phase in the VPC task. We found that this ΔVPC score (and vocabulary) predicted children's performance in the ERM task, whereas other potential predictors such as age and conventional novelty preference did not. We discuss the impact of these findings in relation to the development of implicit and explicit memory. Furthermore, we propose that VPC measures are associated with explicit memory only when the participants processed the stimuli conceptually. In such cases, we suggest that the ΔVPC score is an approximation of how demanding it is to construct the mental representation of the familiar stimulus during the test phase.

Events structure information accessibility less in children than adults

To manage the onslaught of continuously unfolding information in our complex environments, we adults are known to carve up our continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentation directly shapes how our everyday experiences are construed: content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state, which is then dropped after an event boundary. The greater accessibility of event-specific information has been shown to influence-at its most basic level-how information is processed and remembered. However, it is as yet unknown if accessibility is similarly influenced by event boundaries in children, who are still developing the working memory capacity and semantic knowledge thought to support event segmentation. Here, we tested seven- to nine-year-old children's and adults' recognition of objects experienced either within or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and faster to correctly recognize objects that last occurred within events versus across event boundaries. We, however, additionally observed an interaction such that children's access to recent experience was less influenced by event boundaries than adults'. Thus, while the spontaneous segmentation of complex events emerges by middle childhood, event structure shapes the active contents of children's minds less reliably than adults'.

Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of 'boundedness' that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely to associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2-3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4-5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6-11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that 'boundedness' of words' referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take.

Event Perception and Memory

Events make up much of our lived experience, and the perceptual mechanisms that represent events in experience have pervasive effects on action control, language use, and remembering. Event representations in both perception and memory have rich internal structure and connections one to another, and both are heavily informed by knowledge accumulated from previous experiences. Event perception and memory have been identified with specific computational and neural mechanisms, which show protracted development in childhood and are affected by language use, expertise, and brain disorders and injuries. Current theoretical approaches focus on the mechanisms by which events are segmented from ongoing experience, and emphasize the common coding of events for perception, action, and memory. Abetted by developments in eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computer science, research on event perception and memory is moving from small-scale laboratory analogs to the complexity of events in the wild.

Meaningful Memory? Eighteen-Month-Olds Only Remember Cartoons With a Meaningful Storyline

In two studies we investigated the importance of a storyline for remembering cartoons across a delay of 2 weeks in 18-month-old infants by means of the visual paired-comparison (VPC) paradigm. In Study 1 seventy-one 18-month-olds were tested using similar cartoons as in a recent study from our lab while varying the richness of the storyline information. In a VPC task half of the infants watched uncompromised versions of the cartoons used in the recent study (Storyline Condition), whereas the other half watched Pixelized versions of the cartoons (number of pixels reduced by 98% covering up the narrative, but leaving perceptual details, e.g., colors, movements, the same, and Pixelized Condition). Two weeks later they were presented with the familiar cartoon and a novel cartoon from the same version (Storyline or Pixelized) simultaneously, while being eye-tracked. Results showed that only the infants in the Storyline Condition remembered the target cartoon, thus suggesting that the storyline is important for memory. However, an alternative interpretation of the results could be that what made the infants in the Storyline Condition remember the target cartoon was not the storyline, but the static conceptual information of the objects and agents present in the cartoon (which was not visible in the Pixelized version). To test this possibility, a control study was created. In Study 2 thirty-six infants were therefore presented with a version of the cartoon in which we broke down the temporal presentation into 1 s segments and presented these out of order. This was done to preserve the static conceptual information (e.g., objects and agents) while still disturbing the storyline. Results showed that the infants in this condition still did not remember the target cartoon, suggesting that the meaningfulness of the storyline - and not only static conceptual information - is important for later memory.

Event Boundaries in Memory and Cognition

Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing fundamental aspects of human cognition. In this paper, we review recent and current work that is driving this field forward. We first outline the Event Horizon Model, which broadly describes the impact of event boundaries on cognition and memory. Then, we address recent work on event segmentation, the role of event cognition in working memory and long-term memory, including event model updating, and long term retention. Throughout we also consider how event cognition varies across individuals and groups of people and consider the neural mechanisms involved.

Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later

When people observe everyday activity, they spontaneously parse it into discrete meaningful events. Individuals who segment activity in a more normative fashion show better subsequent memory for the events. If segmenting events effectively leads to better memory, does asking people to attend to segmentation improve subsequent memory? To answer this question, participants viewed movies of naturalistic activity with instructions to remember the activity for a later test, and in some conditions additionally pressed a button to segment the movies into meaningful events or performed a control condition that required button-pressing but not attending to segmentation. In 5 experiments, memory for the movies was assessed at intervals ranging from immediately following viewing to 1 month later. Performing the event segmentation task led to superior memory at delays ranging from 10 min to 1 month. Further, individual differences in segmentation ability predicted individual differences in memory performance for up to a month following encoding. This study provides the first evidence that manipulating event segmentation affects memory over long delays and that individual differences in event segmentation are related to differences in memory over long delays. These effects suggest that attending to how an activity breaks down into meaningful events contributes to memory formation. Instructing people to more effectively segment events may serve as a potential intervention to alleviate everyday memory complaints in aging and clinical populations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Bound to remember: Infants show superior memory for objects presented at event boundaries

Following Event Segmentation Theory (EST) adult memory is enhanced at event boundaries (EB). The present study set out to explore this in infancy. Sixty-eight 21-month-olds watched a cartoon with one of two objects (counterbalanced) inserted for 3s either at EB or between EB. Ten minutes later they watched both objects (familiar and novel) in a 10s Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) test while being eye-tracked. Furthermore, they were asked to point to the previous object. Based on EST, we hypothesized that objects inserted at EB would be processed more fully, resulting in improved memory compared to objects inserted between EB. Only infants with objects at EB exhibited memory evidenced by a transient familiarity preference for the first 3s of the test. Only 18 infants completed the pointing test, but all infants presented with objects at EB (10/10) pointed to the correct (familiar) object, which was not the case for the infants presented with objects between EB (5/8).