Episodic Memory Across the Lifespan General Trajectories and Modifiers

Episodic memory (EM) refers to memory about events that are bound to specific times and places in the past (Tulving, 2002). It allows humans to re‐experience multiple aspects of events that happened from minutes to years ago. The remembering of previously experienced episodes increases during childhood (Schneider and Pressley, 1997) and declines in old and very old age (Kausler, 1994). At first sight, then, it might appear that changes in adulthood are a reversal or mirror image of changes during childhood. However, development of EM is driven by a constellation of factors, including changes in neural brain mechanisms, accumulation of experience and learning, and genetic influences (Lindenberger, Li, and Bäckman, 2006; Werkle‐Bergner et al., 2006). Importantly, the influences of these factors do not remain constant across the lifespan, such that the lower performance levels in children and older adults relative to younger adults may differ in etiology (Baltes, Lindenberger, and Staudinger, 2006). In the present chapter, we provide an overview of the general trajectories of memory development across the lifespan, integrating both behavioral and neural evidence. We adopt the two‐component framework (Shing et al., 2010) that conceptualizes change in EM across the lifespan as the interplay of two largely independent but interacting components, one associative and the other strategic (cf. Simons and Spiers, 2003). The associative component refers to mechanisms that bind different features of an event into a coherent representation, and is mediated by areas of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) at the neural level (Zimmer, Mecklinger, and Lindenberger, 2006; see also Chapter 18). The strategic component, on the other hand, refers to control processes that aid and regulate memory functions at encoding and retrieval (Chapter 7; for more discussion of the development of strategic memory processes, see Chapter 16). Neurally, the strategic component is supported by regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC; Miller and Cohen, 2001) and the parietal lobes (Cabeza et al., 2008). A series