A Systematic Exploration of when Elements of Episodic Memory Begin to Emerge in Young Children

There have been decades of research into the underlying mechanisms of episodic memory including its' emergence and ontogeny. Much of the early research into the emergence of episodic memory claims that it does not appear until around the age of 4 (e.g., Tulving, 2005). However, more recent research, using adapted measures of EM for even younger children, have found evidence for episodic memory present at 3 years (e.g., Bauer et al, 2013) and even by the 2nd year of infancy (Bauer & Leventon, 2013).

A surface-level interpretation of these findings would merely imply that previous research illustrates uncertainties regarding the emergence of EM. However, these findings should not be considered in parallel with one another as they adopt the use of different tasks (e.g., picture sequence memory task and elicited imitation) and whilst these are known to be measures of EM, we must be careful to assume that they are measuring identical psychological processes.

Furthermore, it may be the case that episodic memory does not fully emerge until the age of 4, however this is likely due to the gradual emergence and development of constituent cognitive abilities that contribute to complete episodic memory. Such discoveries only perpetuate the notion that episodic memory should be approached not as a unitary construct, but rather a multifaceted process. Implementing and using multiple assessments of episodic memory in a systematic manner can allow us to gain a greater understanding of when these different processes begin to emerge in earlier years and the trajectory at which they develop. This 'divide-and-conquer' design for assessing elements of EM (Cystal & Suddendorf, 2019) is particularly essential when working with pre- or early-verbal participants, as attempting to create a single, unified measure of wholistic EM may require complex levels of cognition and language abilities that have not yet been fully developed at this stage.

If such a battery can be effectively developed for very young children, these assessments could then be adapted to test AI agents. A recent line of research, the Animal-AI testbed (Crosby et al., 2020), adopts a comparative cognition design, placing an AI agent in a 3D virtual environment where they can be tested on a range of cognitive tasks that have been previously successfully completed by animals. Notably, however, there remains to have been developed an assessment of the cognitive processes required for EM in AI agents, which could provide invaluable insight into the rapidly evolving work surrounding the integration of Artificial Intelligence into social and professional spheres.

This brief outline of existing literature reveals two overarching lacunae that I aim to overcome in this project: a systematic ontogeny of episodic memory in infancy/early childhood, and the development of robust and valid assessments for testing elements of episodic memory in AI agents.


As such, the research aims are as follows:
1) To implement existing, and develop novel, tests of EM culminating in a battery of assessments for very young children

2) To use the data on task performance to develop additional tests of EM for preverbal infants and AI agents

This research will contribute to a comprehensive timeline of how cognition develops to culminate in full, reconstructive, episodic memory. A timeline of this evolvement of episodic-like cognition in young children would add novel insight to the knowledge base of EM emergence. The development of a medium through which to test episodic memory in artificial intelligence would also allow us to conduct the first direct human-AI comparison on this measure.