Emmy Noether Group RAVEN (Real-world Application of Variability in Episodic memory and Neurodevelopment)

The Raven group investigates how changes in early memory abilities and in the brain explain how accurately children remember meaningful experiences from their everyday lives from age 4 to age 10. By connecting lab findings to real-world memories, we hope to better understand how children build lasting memories that shape their sense of identity and structure their knowledge of the world.

The capacities to generalize in new situations and retain specific memories are fundamental to learning and well-being. Early in life, infants and toddlers excel at building generalizable knowledge, but the ability to recollect specific events follows a more prolonged developmental trajectory. The Raven group targets three main questions:

 

1. How do within-child changes in each memory process measured in the lab reflect changes in children’s real-world memory capacities?
2. How do within-child changes in each memory process, measured in the lab and in the wild, relate to growth in other cognitive  and social domains?
3. How does brain maturation explain memory growth?

The answers to these questions require a theory-driven approach that tightly maps the concurrent developmental changes between children’s personal memories to three domains: lab-based memory assessments, broad cognitive and social developmental profiles, and neural correlates of memory. We are conducting a longitudinal study that continuously tracks such changes in the same children spanning age 4 to age 10, a window in which memories of real-life events transition from being fragile or even inaccessible to becoming robust and persistent. In sum, our research program applies contemporary neurocomputational models to an age-old question of why early childhood memories are vulnerable to retrieval inaccessibility later in life.