Episodic memory during middle childhood: What is developing?

Whereas previous research has concentrated on the emergence of episodic memory during the early years, fewer investigations have explored the details of this development through middle and late childhood. Considerable variation in task demands and testing methodologies have rendered the trajectory of episodic memory during this period unclear, particularly with regard to which elements are in a state of change at which time. This study separately assessed memory for item, location, and temporal order, as well as integrated what-where-when (WWW) information using a WWW memory test (the Treasure Hunt task), with 84 children aged 6 to 12 years. Two versions of the task were used, varying in the degree of retrieval support while keeping encoding constant. Results show that episodic memory continued to develop across this period, with individual item, spatial, temporal, and WWW memory all improving relatively linearly with age. These improvements were underpinned by both the associative binding and strategic control processes. These findings suggest that it is not any one element of episodic memory that is driving development during this period but that all aspects are continuing to mature in parallel.

Rethink reporting of evaluation results in AI.

Aggregate metrics and lack of access to results limit understanding.

Imagine this: Visualising a recent meal as bigger reduces subsequent snack intake.

Remembering a recent meal reduces subsequent intake of palatable snacks (i.e. the meal-recall effect), however, little is known about the factors which can potentiate this effect. The present experiment investigated whether a stronger meal-recall effect would be observed if recent consumption would be recalled in greater detail, than if it was recalled briefly. Moreover, it was investigated whether imagining a meal as bigger and more satiating than in reality could potentiate the meal-recall effect, and lead to lower intake. It was also explored whether mental visualisation tasks of a recent meal would affect the remembered portion size. Participants (N = 151) ate lunch at the laboratory, and then returned 3 h later to perform the imagination tasks and to participate in a bogus taste test (during which intake was covertly measured). Participants in the two main imagination task groups recalled the lunch meal and then either recalled the consumption episode in great detail or imagined the meal was larger and more filling than in reality. The results showed that imagining a recent meal as larger significantly reduced the quantity of biscuits eaten. However, contrary to the hypotheses, recalling a consumption episode in detail did not decrease snack intake. It was also shown that imagining a recent meal as larger than in reality did not lead participants to overestimate the true size of the meal. In fact, portion size estimations were significantly underestimated in that group. There were no significant estimation differences in any of the other groups. The results of this study suggest that the meal-recall effect can be an effective strategy to reduce food intake and may be amenable to strategic manipulation to enhance efficacy, but seems prone to disruption.

Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment.

Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing (such as Chess and Go) towards ability-oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain kinds of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriented testing used in comparative psychology to AI systems. Here, we present the first direct human-AI comparison in the Animal-AI Environment, using children aged 6-10 (n = 52). We found that children of all ages were significantly better than a sample of 30 AIs across most of the tests we examined, as well as performing significantly better than the two top-scoring AIs, "ironbar" and "Trrrrr," from the Animal-AI Olympics Competition 2019. While children and AIs performed similarly on basic navigational tasks, AIs performed significantly worse in more complex cognitive tests, including detour tasks, spatial elimination tasks, and object permanence tasks, indicating that AIs lack several cognitive abilities that children aged 6-10 possess. Both children and AIs performed poorly on tool-use tasks, suggesting that these tests are challenging for both biological and non-biological machines.

COVCOG 1: Factors Predicting Physical, Neurological and Cognitive Symptoms in Long COVID in a Community Sample. A First Publication From the COVID and Cognition Study.

Since its first emergence in December 2019, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has evolved into a global pandemic. Whilst often considered a respiratory disease, a large proportion of COVID-19 patients report neurological symptoms, and there is accumulating evidence for neural damage in some individuals, with recent studies suggesting loss of gray matter in multiple regions, particularly in the left hemisphere. There are a number of mechanisms by which COVID-19 infection may lead to neurological symptoms and structural and functional changes in the brain, and it is reasonable to expect that many of these may translate into cognitive problems. Indeed, cognitive problems are one of the most commonly reported symptoms in those experiencing "Long COVID"-the chronic illness following COVID-19 infection that affects between 10 and 25% of patients. The COVID and Cognition Study is a part cross-sectional, part longitudinal, study documenting and aiming to understand the cognitive problems in Long COVID. In this first paper from the study, we document the characteristics of our sample of 181 individuals who had experienced COVID-19 infection, and 185 who had not. We explore which factors may be predictive of ongoing symptoms and their severity, as well as conducting an in-depth analysis of symptom profiles. Finally, we explore which factors predict the presence and severity of cognitive symptoms, both throughout the ongoing illness and at the time of testing. The main finding from this first analysis is that that severity of initial illness is a significant predictor of the presence and severity of ongoing symptoms, and that some symptoms during the initial illness-particularly limb weakness-may be more common in those that have more severe ongoing symptoms. Symptom profiles can be well described in terms of 5 or 6 factors, reflecting the variety of this highly heterogenous condition experienced by the individual. Specifically, we found that neurological/psychiatric and fatigue/mixed symptoms during the initial illness, and that neurological, gastrointestinal, and cardiopulmonary/fatigue symptoms during the ongoing illness, predicted experience of cognitive symptoms.

COVCOG 2: Cognitive and Memory Deficits in Long COVID: A Second Publication From the COVID and Cognition Study.

COVID-19, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been often characterized as a respiratory disease. However, it is increasingly being understood as an infection that impacts multiple systems, and many patients report neurological symptoms. Indeed, there is accumulating evidence for neural damage in some individuals, with recent studies suggesting loss of gray matter in multiple regions, particularly in the left hemisphere. There are several mechanisms by which the COVID-19 infection may lead to neurological symptoms and structural and functional changes in the brain, and cognitive problems are one of the most commonly reported symptoms in those experiencing Long COVID - the chronic illness following the COVID-19 infection that affects between 10 and 25% of patients. However, there is yet little research testing cognition in Long COVID. The COVID and Cognition Study is a cross-sectional/longitudinal study aiming to understand cognitive problems in Long COVID. The first paper from the study explored the characteristics of our sample of 181 individuals who had experienced the COVID-19 infection, and 185 who had not, and the factors that predicted ongoing symptoms and self-reported cognitive deficits. In this second paper from the study, we assess this sample on tests of memory, language, and executive function. We hypothesize that performance on "objective" cognitive tests will reflect self-reported cognitive symptoms. We further hypothesize that some symptom profiles may be more predictive of cognitive performance than others, perhaps giving some information about the mechanism. We found a consistent pattern of memory deficits in those that had experienced the COVID-19 infection, with deficits increasing with the severity of self-reported ongoing symptoms. Fatigue/Mixed symptoms during the initial illness and ongoing neurological symptoms were predictive of cognitive performance.

Memory and eating: A bidirectional relationship implicated in obesity.

This paper reviews evidence demonstrating a bidirectional relationship between memory and eating in humans and rodents. In humans, amnesia is associated with impaired processing of hunger and satiety cues, disrupted memory of recent meals, and overconsumption. In healthy participants, meal-related memory limits subsequent ingestive behavior and obesity is associated with impaired memory and disturbances in the hippocampus. Evidence from rodents suggests that dorsal hippocampal neural activity contributes to the ability of meal-related memory to control future intake, that endocrine and neuropeptide systems act in the ventral hippocampus to provide cues regarding energy status and regulate learned aspects of eating, and that consumption of hypercaloric diets and obesity disrupt these processes. Collectively, this evidence indicates that diet-induced obesity may be caused and/or maintained, at least in part, by a vicious cycle wherein excess intake disrupts hippocampal functioning, which further increases intake. This perspective may advance our understanding of how the brain controls eating, the neural mechanisms that contribute to eating-related disorders, and identify how to treat diet-induced obesity.

General intelligence disentangled via a generality metric for natural and artificial intelligence.

Success in all sorts of situations is the most classical interpretation of general intelligence. Under limited resources, however, the capability of an agent must necessarily be limited too, and generality needs to be understood as comprehensive performance up to a level of difficulty. The degree of generality then refers to the way an agent's capability is distributed as a function of task difficulty. This dissects the notion of general intelligence into two non-populational measures, generality and capability, which we apply to individuals and groups of humans, other animals and AI systems, on several cognitive and perceptual tests. Our results indicate that generality and capability can decouple at the individual level: very specialised agents can show high capability and vice versa. The metrics also decouple at the population level, and we rarely see diminishing returns in generality for those groups of high capability. We relate the individual measure of generality to traditional notions of general intelligence and cognitive efficiency in humans, collectives, non-human animals and machines. The choice of the difficulty function now plays a prominent role in this new conception of generality, which brings a quantitative tool for shedding light on long-standing questions about the evolution of general intelligence and the evaluation of progress in Artificial General Intelligence.

How does episodic memory develop in adolescence?

Key areas of the episodic memory (EM) network demonstrate changing structure and volume during adolescence. EM is multifaceted and yet studies of EM thus far have largely examined single components, used different methods and have unsurprisingly yielded inconsistent results. The Treasure Hunt task is a single paradigm that allows parallel investigation of memory content, associative structure, and the impact of different retrieval support. Combining the cognitive and neurobiological accounts, we hypothesized that some elements of EM performance may decline in late adolescence owing to considerable restructuring of the hippocampus at this time. Using the Treasure Hunt task, we examined EM performance in 80 participants aged 10-17 yr. Results demonstrated a cubic trajectory with youngest and oldest participants performing worst. This was emphasized in associative memory, which aligns well with existing literature indicating hippocampal restructuring in later adolescence. It is proposed that memory development may follow a nonlinear path as children approach adulthood, but that future work is required to confirm and extend the trends demonstrated in this study.

Artificial Intelligence and the Common Sense of Animals.

The problem of common sense remains a major obstacle to progress in artificial intelligence. Here, we argue that common sense in humans is founded on a set of basic capacities that are possessed by many other animals, capacities pertaining to the understanding of objects, space, and causality. The field of animal cognition has developed numerous experimental protocols for studying these capacities and, thanks to progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL), it is now possible to apply these methods directly to evaluate RL agents in 3D environments. Besides evaluation, the animal cognition literature offers a rich source of behavioural data, which can serve as inspiration for RL tasks and curricula.

Experimental Effects of Acute High-Intensity Resistance Exercise on Episodic Memory Function: Consideration for Post-Exercise Recovery Period.

BACKGROUND: The present experiments evaluated the effects of acute high-intensity resistance exercise on episodic memory. METHODS: Two experiments were conducted. For Experiment 1, participants (N = 40; Mage = 21.0 years) were randomized into one of two groups, including an experimental exercise group and a control group (seated for 20 min). The experimental group engaged in an acute bout of resistance exercises (circuit style exercises) for 15 minutes, followed by a 5-min recovery period. Memory function was subsequently assessed using a multiple trial (immediate and delay), word-list episodic memory task (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, RAVLT), and then followed by a comprehensive, computerized assessment of episodic memory (Treasure Hunt task, THT). The THT involved a spatio-temporal assessment of what, where, and when components of episodic memory. Experiment 2 evaluated if altering the recovery period would influence the potential negative effects of high-intensity resistance exercise on episodic memory function. For Experiment 2, participants (N = 51) were randomized into the same acute resistance exercise protocol but either with a 10-min recovery period, 20-min recovery period, or a control group. RESULTS: For Experiment 1, for RAVLT, the exercise group performed worse (Fgroup × time = 3.7, p = .001, η 2p = .09). Across nearly all THT outcomes, the exercise group had worse spatio-temporal memory than the control group. These results suggest that high-intensity resistance exercise (with a 5-min recovery) may have a detrimental effect on episodic memory function. For Experiment 2, for RAVLT, the exercise with 10-min recovery group performed better (Fgroup × time = 3.1, p = .04, η 2p = .11). Unlike Experiment 1, exercise did not impair spatio-temporal memory, with the 20-min exercise recovery group having the best "where" component of episodic memory. CONCLUSION: Collectively, the results from these two experiments suggest that acute high-intensity resistance exercise may impair episodic memory when a short exercise recovery period (e.g., 5-min) is employed, but with a longer recovery period (10+ min), acute high-intensity resistance exercise may, potentially, enhance episodic memory.

The role of memory ability, depth and mode of recall in the impact of memory on later consumption.

It has been shown that recalling a meal eaten a few hours earlier (vs. the previous day) leads to reduced snacking ('meal-recall' effect). This study attempted to replicate this effect, by assessing participants' (N = 77, mean age = 33.30 [SD = 14.98], mean BMI = 23.77 [SD = 3.72], 74% female) biscuit consumption during a bogus taste test in two separate sessions, before which participants recalled a recent or a distant meal. It was explored whether factors that might affect the quality of a meal-memory, particularly individual differences in memory ability and depth of recall, would influence the meal-recall effect. To this end, only participants with a low or high memory ability were recruited for the study and were allocated to either an unguided-recall or guided-recall condition. In the unguided condition, participants were asked to recall what they ate, and in the guided condition they were prompted for further details regarding their meal. Participants were asked to either recall their meal out loud through an interview with the experimenter or by writing their recollection down on the computer. Contrary to the initial hypotheses, it was found that only the written group demonstrated the meal-recall effect, whereas the verbal group did not. Moreover, this was specific to the written, unguided group, in which participants ate about 9 g fewer biscuits after recalling a recent (vs. a distant) meal, F (1,15) = 6.07, p = .026, ηp2 = 0.288. The written, guided group's snacking seemed to increase by about 8 g after recalling a recent (vs. a distant) meal, F (1,20) = 7.31, p = .014, ηp2 = 0.268. The meal-recall effect was not evident in the verbal group. Memory ability did not influence the magnitude of the meal-recall effect. The results highlight the importance of contextual factors in modulating the meal-recall effect.

Load effect on what-where-when memory in younger and older adults.

Episodic memory (EM) is a subsystem responsible for storing and evoking information about the "What", "Where" and "When" elements of an event in an integrated way. This capacity depends of structures with hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The effect of aging on some capacities mediated by these areas, such as the influence of the number of objects on the coding of EM, remains unexplored. The present study examined the memory recall capacity of young and older adults in an EM task which used the number of 2, 4 and 6 items associated with specific space-temporal contexts. The young adults showed better performance coefficients than the older adults in all tasks, regardless of the load used, for all questions, except the "What" type. The group differences increase with load augmentation, stabilizing from the tasks with 4 items. In short, the EM efficiency, evaluated through What-Where-When Task, depends on the quantity information encoding.

New Caledonian crows infer the weight of objects from observing their movements in a breeze.

Humans use a variety of cues to infer an object's weight, including how easily objects can be moved. For example, if we observe an object being blown down the street by the wind, we can infer that it is light. Here, we tested whether New Caledonian crows make this type of inference. After training that only one type of object (either light or heavy) was rewarded when dropped into a food dispenser, birds observed pairs of novel objects (one light and one heavy) suspended from strings in front of an electric fan. The fan was either on-creating a breeze which buffeted the light, but not the heavy, object-or off, leaving both objects stationary. In subsequent test trials, birds could drop one, or both, of the novel objects into the food dispenser. Despite having no opportunity to handle these objects prior to testing, birds touched the correct object (light or heavy) first in 73% of experimental trials, and were at chance in control trials. Our results suggest that birds used pre-existing knowledge about the behaviour exhibited by differently weighted objects in the wind to infer their weight, using this information to guide their choices.

What is the role of episodic foresight in planning for future needs? Theory and two experiments.

Considerable evidence suggests that episodic memory and foresight rely on the same underlying cognitive processes. Some theorists have suggested that the key role of episodic foresight is to allow an individual to disengage from current states to plan for future needs. However, the contribution of episodic cognition to this type of planning has not been investigated. We present two experiments exploring future-state planning in 3-6-year-old children and healthy young adults, finding that both groups were consistently biased towards current states. We further found that there were few relationships between episodic memory ability and future-state planning. Where there was a relationship, the degree of bias was positively related to episodic memory ability, such that those with better episodic were more biased by their current motivational state. These findings are consistent with previous research suggesting that episodic cognition is particularly vulnerable to bias from current feelings. We propose an account in which episodic cognition allows for cross-talk between current and future motivational states, and that while this can aid prospective decision-making in some scenarios, it may hinder it in others.

Specifying a Causal Role for Angular Gyrus in Autobiographical Memory.

Considerable recent evidence indicates that angular gyrus dysfunction in humans does not result in amnesia, but does impair a number of aspects of episodic memory. Patients with parietal lobe lesions have been reported to exhibit a deficit when freely recalling autobiographical events from their pasts, but can remember details of the events when recall is cued by specific questions. In apparent contradiction, inhibitory brain stimulation targeting angular gyrus in healthy volunteers has been found to have no effect on free recall or cued recall of word pairs. The present study sought to resolve this inconsistency by testing free and cued recall of both autobiographical memories and word-pair memories in the same healthy male and female human participants following continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) of angular gyrus and a vertex control location. Angular gyrus cTBS resulted in a selective reduction in the free recall, but not cued recall, of autobiographical memories, whereas free and cued recall of word-pair memories were unaffected. Additionally, participants reported fewer autobiographical episodes as being experienced from a first-person perspective following angular gyrus cTBS. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that a function of angular gyrus within the network of brain regions responsible for episodic recollection is to integrate memory features within an egocentric framework into the kind of first-person perspective representation that enables the subjective experience of remembering events from our personal pasts.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In seeking to understand the role played by the angular gyrus region of parietal cortex in human memory, interpreting the often conflicting findings from neuroimaging and neuropsychology studies has been hampered by differences in anatomical specificity and localization between methods. In the present study, we address these limitations using continuous theta burst stimulation in healthy volunteers to disrupt function of angular gyrus and a vertex control region. With this method, we adjudicate between two competing theories of parietal lobe function, finding evidence that is inconsistent with an attentional role for angular gyrus in memory, supporting instead an account in terms of integrating memory features within an egocentric framework into a first-person perspective representation that enables the subjective experience of remembering.

Exploring the relative contributions of reward-history and functionality information to children's acquisition of the Aesop's fable task.

Investigation of tool-using behaviours has long been a means by which to explore causal reasoning in children and nonhuman animals. Much of the recent research has focused on the "Aesop's Fable" paradigm, in which objects must be dropped into water to bring a floating reward within reach. An underlying problem with these, as with many causal reasoning studies, is that functionality information and reward history are confounded: a tool that is functionally useful is also rewarded, while a tool that is not functionally useful is not rewarded. It is therefore not possible to distinguish between behaviours motivated by functional understanding of the properties of the objects involved, and those influenced by reward-history. Here, we devised an adapted version of the Aesop's Fable paradigm which decouples functionality information and reward history by making use of situations in which the use of a particular tool should have enabled a subject to obtain (or not obtain) a reward, but the outcome was affected by the context. Children aged 4-11 were given experience of a range of tools that varied independently in whether they were functional or non-functional and rewarded or non-rewarded. They were then given the opportunity to choose which tools they would like to use in a test trial, thereby providing an assessment of whether they relied on information about functionality or the reward history associated with the object or a combination of the two. Children never significantly used reward history to drive their choices of tools, while the influence of functionality information increased with age, becoming dominant by age 7. However, not all children behaved in a consistent manner, and even by 10 years of age, only around a third exclusively used functionality as a basis for their decision-making. These findings suggest that from around the age of 7-years, children begin to emphasize functionality information when learning in novel situations, even if competing reward information is available, but that even in the oldest age-group, most children did not exclusively use functionality information.

The development of support intuitions and object causality in juvenile Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius).

Knowledge about the causal relationship between objects has been studied extensively in human infants, and more recently in adult animals using differential looking time experiments. How knowledge about object support develops in non-human animals has yet to be explored. Here, we studied the ontogeny of support relations in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius), a bird species known for its sophisticated cognitive abilities. Using an expectancy violation paradigm, we measured looking time responses to possible and impossible video and image stimuli. We also controlled for experience with different support types to determine whether the emergence of support intuitions is dependent upon specific interactions with objects, or if reasoning develops independently. At age 9 months, birds looked more at a tool moving a piece of cheese that was not in contact than one that was in direct contact. By the age of 6 months, birds that had not experienced string as a support to hold up objects looked more at impossible images with string hanging from below (unsupported), rather than above (supported). The development of support intuitions may be independent of direct experience with specific support, or knowledge gained from interactions with other objects may be generalised across contexts.