Development of the Ability to Bind Relations

Abstract

In contrast to traditional approaches measuring the development of spatial memory based on the reduction of distance between the target and the reconstructed item, this study explored the reduction of three kinds of errors (identity error, global error, and local error) that contribute to the distance between the target and the reconstructed item in children from three to eighteen years old, as well as comparing these errors between typically developing children (TD) and children with Down syndrome (DS). Consistent with previous studies, older children outperformed younger children in terms of overall memory accuracy, and the TD children showed better performance than the DS children. More importantly, we found uneven maturational trajectories of memory abilities related to reducing the various errors. In the TD group, global error, which captures the errors resulting from the participants moving all the items in one direction, reduces about four years of age. Local error, measuring memory precision, reduces from the age of three to the teenage years. Identity error, related to remembering the identity of each item to avoid putting one item into another item’s location, showed no significant reduction before the age of eight. In addition, TD males showed less global error and local error than DS males, while no such effect was found in females. Overall, our study contributed to a fine-grained understanding of developing spatial memory ability in TD and DS.