Remembering personal past events and their order is important. These capacities are essential to episodic and autobiographical memory theories, are needed in the creation of life stories and vital in forensic settings. As important as memory for events and their order are, relatively little is known about their development and the underlying neural processes that support them. Further, there is a paucity of studies that have examined memory and its development for autobiographical, yet controlled, events. The objective of this study was to examine memory for the temporal order of naturalistic “real world” events by directly comparing 7-11-year-olds and adults using both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures. Participants photographed events at a local museum and after a delay, we used their photographs to test their memory for the temporal order of pairs of the events. We experimentally manipulated the temporal distance between the event pairs (whether the two events photographed in the pair had a short or long temporal distance between them). A memory asymmetry manipulation was also included such that at retrieval, photographs were either presented in forward direction (photograph on the top configuration was taken before photograph shown on the bottom) or vice versa. Children and adults showed sensitivity to temporal distance between events based on behavior (in some instances accuracy was higher for long compared to short temporal distance) and ERP (differential neural processing for short and long temporal distance conditions). Only adults showed sensitivity to the memory asymmetry manipulation, and only when the events occurred within a short temporal distance. A larger study is needed to confirm the present “proof of concept” study results. There is strong potential of this photo paradigm approach, combining naturalistic events with ERP, in future developmental studies, and would further our understanding of how memory behavior and the neural processes underlying memory operate in the “real world.”

中文翻译：

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儿童和成人对博物馆中事件顺序的记忆：利用拍照和事件相关电位对时间记忆及其发展的初步研究

记住个人过去的事件及其顺序很重要。这些能力对于情景记忆和自传体记忆理论至关重要，在创作生活故事时需要，在法医环境中也至关重要。与事件及其顺序的记忆一样重要，人们对事件的发展和支持它们的潜在神经过程知之甚少。此外，很少有研究针对自传式但受控的事件来检验记忆及其发展。本研究的目的是通过使用行为和事件相关电位 (ERP) 测量直接比较 7-11 岁儿童和成年人，检查自然“现实世界”事件的时间顺序的记忆。参与者在当地博物馆拍摄了事件，延迟后，我们使用他们的照片来测试他们对事件对的时间顺序的记忆。我们通过实验操纵事件对之间的时间距离（事件对中拍摄的两个事件之间的时间距离是短还是长）。还包括记忆不对称操作，以便在检索时，照片要么向前呈现（顶部配置的照片在底部显示的照片之前拍摄），反之亦然。儿童和成人对基于行为的事件之间的时间距离表现出敏感性（在某些情况下，与短时间距离相比，长时间距离的准确性更高）和 ERP（短时间距离和长时间距离条件下的差分神经处理）。只有成年人对记忆不对称操纵表现出敏感性，并且只有当事件发生在较短的时间距离内时。需要进行更大规模的研究来证实目前的“概念验证”研究结果。这种将自然事件与 ERP 相结合的照片范式方法在未来的发展研究中具有巨大的潜力，并将进一步我们对记忆行为和记忆背后的神经过程如何在“现实世界”中运作的理解。