The influence of semantic knowledge on episodic memory in middle childhood

Recent experiments have shown that children and adults use semantic information to fill in details when asked to remember previously experienced events (Sipe & Pathman, 2021; Zöllner et al., 2022). This is in line with the scenario construction model (Cheng et al., 2016), proposing that only gist information is stored in episodic memory. From this perspective, a person reminiscing about a past episode generates the respective past scenario in their mind by filling in missing details from their pre-existing knowledge that is, semantic knowledge. This process is referred to as semantic construction. From a developmental perspective, it is conceivable that the influence of semantic knowledge on episodic memory might vary as a function of age. Due to their limited experience, children might not only possess semantic information about fewer types of events, but their available semantic information might be of relatively low strength even in familiar situations because they have had comparatively fewer exposures to relevant situations. For example, whereas children can be expected to know where certain household items typically belong in an apartment, these assumptions are based on fewer relevant experiences than it is the case for adults. Hence, it is possible that semantic construction is less prominent in children compared to adults and that semantic construction increases with age in childhood. The present study will use an age-adequate version of recently developed virtual episodic memory paradigm (Zöllner et al., 2022) to study semantic construction in primary-school aged children.