Emmy Noether Group RAVEN | Real-world Applications of Variability in Episodic memory and Neurodevelopment

Head: Chi (Zoe) Ngo
 

Bridging Lab-based Assessments to Memory in Real-World Contexts
Building Generalizable Knowledge from Individual Experiences
Learning and Memory Development in Vulnerable Populations

Remembering the past shapes our sense of identity, structures world knowledge, and guides our forecasts of the future. Understanding the multidimensionality of memory development requires us to analyze the complementary and opposing memory goals. One goal is to extract the regularities that cut across multiple past experiences and appropriately deploy such knowledge in new situations. The other goal is to preserve the specificity of past events so that we can recollect a particular instance with minimal interference. An adaptive memory system is geared with regularity detectors for knowledge accumulation but also logs an autobiographical record of idiosyncratic experiences. The Emmy Noether Group RAVEN studies how children assemble the foundational building blocks of learning and memory abilities across childhood and how such memory abilities relate to children's memories for personal life events. Its research commenced in June 2025.

Bridging Lab-based Assessments to Memory in Real-World Contexts

RAVEN is conducting a 5-year longitudinal study that continuously tracks developmental changes in the same children spanning ages 3 to 10 years, a window in which memories of real-life events transition from being fragile or even inaccessible to becoming robust and persistent. RAVEN's focus is on three guiding questions:

1. How do laboratory memory measures translate to children's memories for personal events? 
2. How does brain maturation explain developmental changes in memory over time? 
3. How does memory development propel or constrain growth in other domains including language, numeracy, reasoning, executive function, and social cognition?

This integrated dataset is crucial for the understanding of children's age-related propensity to acquire and retain certain kinds of information over others. Most excitingly, it directly applies contemporary neurocomputational models to an age-old question of why early childhood memories are vulnerable to retrieval failure later in life.

Building Generalizable Knowledge from Individual Experiences

Early in life, infants and toddlers excel at building generalizable knowledge about the world, amassing an expressive vocabulary, partitioning objects into categories, and following (some) social rules. In contrast, the ability to recollect specific events follows a more prolonged developmental trajectory (Ngo, Horner, et al., 2019; Ngo, Lin, et al., 2019). Memory models posit that new knowledge is built by retrieving specific episodic memories. While this is true in young adults (Ngo et al., 2021), Karjack et al. (2025) found that between the ages of 3 and 8, children may not rely as heavily on detailed episodic memories to build new schemas. The reliance of successful generalization on episodic memories strengthens with age.

These findings invite the question of how young children acquire accurate generalizable knowledge in the face of imprecise episodic memories. To answer this question, the RAVEN team is conducting an experiment that continuously tracks schema formation and memory specificity over time as children build a new schema. Departing from previous research that examines preexisting semantic knowledge, we introduce a new schema (e.g., an underwater city tour) to children aged 4 to 10 through repeated experiences (see Figure 3). This research will shed light on what aspects of previous experiences children extract and retain to generate novel inferences in new situations, and how this ability develops across childhood.

Key References

Learning and Memory Development in Vulnerable Populations

One of the RAVEN projects extends cognitive profiling to children in under-resourced areas and is led by doctoral candidate Pedro Espinosa-Villafranca, in collaboration with partner sites at the University of the Andes (Quibdó, Colombia) and the University of Cape Coast (Cape Coast, Ghana). In a two-year longitudinal study spanning ages 5 to 7, the team is examining whether variability in day-to-day physical activity relates to longitudinal cognitive growth, with a primary focus on memory development. They further plan to investigate how environmental characteristics (e.g., playground access, neighborhood safety, and movement opportunities at school) and chronic life stressors (e.g., poverty and community violence) shape learning and memory over the course of two years (see Figure 4). The group is particularly interested in exploring the potential protective role of physical activity against the negative impacts of chronic stress on developmental outcomes. In addition to the scientific goals, the group aims to invest in local scientific capacity as a first step toward inclusive public policy. This arm of RAVEN's research is made possible by recent momentum from the LEarning VAriability NeTwork Exchange (LEVANTE) by the Jacobs Foundation (https://levante-network.org/). As part of the first awarded cohort, the RAVEN group contributes to globally coordinated open-access data collection using shared measures of cognition and detailed context assessments.