Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Casey, BJ

Abstract

Context greatly impacts what information is encoded and retrieved by different memorysystems. Development is one such context that shifts what information is prioritized and subsequently remembered. Despite an abundance of studies on the development of different forms of memory across the life course, much of this research assesses specific types of memory compared to an adult baseline, rather than examining the interaction of these memory systems at different points in development. In this dissertation, I investigate how development influences what information is encoded and retained in three core memory systems: working memory, recognition memory, and episodic memory. I demonstrate that both the cognitive demands of an n-back task, and the similarity between neural representations of items encoded in working memory, influence what items are subsequently recognized at different ages. I also present a novel task-free functional neuroimaging paradigm, validated in adults and designed to measure the similarity between encoded and retrieved representations of multimodal episodes, providing a future avenue to assess cued episodic recall in a broad range of age ranges and capabilities. Together this work provides evidence that encoding and retrieval contexts influence what information is prioritized in memory in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Download

Share

COinS