Episodic Memory

Episodic memory contains different types of contextual details. These details include perceptual, emotional, and cognitive features. All of these need to be integrated. The process of formation of episodic memory includes binding. We encode the relationship among the stimuli and the selected features. We attribute an episode to its source on the basis of these contextual features. Developmental psychology research adopting familiarity-based versus recollection-based judgments (Remember/Know paradigm) have recorded improvement in recollecting contextual details as one grows from childhood to adulthood. This difference has also been attributed to the immature development of medial temporal and frontal lobe brain structures. This has been considered as the neurobiological cause of developmental difference in the source memory of children.

To certain degree the retrieval of episodic memory depends on the richness of the contextual details linked to the memory traces. For any given event, memory about the occurrence (content) is different from memory of the acquisition of the context of the occurrence. Memory of the content of the event occurs in the absence of contextual recollection. When we attempt to recollect the contextual details associated with a given episode, we are referring to source memory. As source memory has to do with the origin of information, it involves perceptual (color for example), contextual (spatiotemporal), affective (emotions), and cognitive (identification) features. Identification of source of memory is an important cognitive ability. Failure to recollect the source while remembering the content is a common memory failure that many people experience. Given that hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are important for episodic memory their involvement in developmental changes in source monitoring and binding is very likely. The animations given below shows the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in the brain.