This project aimed to describe the emergence, development, and function of different parallel memory systems in children and adults with a typical development, and in individuals with Down syndrome (Trisomy 21 or T21) or Williams syndrome (WS).
This project aimed to describe the emergence, development, and function of different parallel memory systems in children and adults with a typical development, and in individuals with Down syndrome (Trisomy 21 or T21) or Williams syndrome (WS).
Research in animals and humans has revealed that there are multiple parallel but dissociable memory systems in the brain. In our laboratory, we focus on understanding the interaction between the hippocampus-dependent “cognitive” (a.k.a. declarative/explicit) memory system that encodes information in flexible, relational representations, and the dorsal striatum-dependent “habit” memory system that encodes information in fixed stimulus-response representations.
Whereas the majority of our understanding of the existence and interactions between these two different memory systems comes from studies of spatial memory, this project aimed to understand how these two different memory systems interact outside the spatial domain. The interaction between these different memory systems was investigated in typically developing children and adults, and in individuals with known impairments in hippocampal-dependent cognitive processes, such as individuals with Down syndrome or with Williams syndrome.
Altogether this series of studies found that hippocampal-dependent learning is not fully developed in young children, confirming our findings in the spatial domain. They further showed that although hippocampal learning is impaired in individuals with WS and DS, it is more severely impaired in individuals with WS, confirming our findings in the spatial domain. More generally, the findings from these studies served to emphasize that detailed individual analyses are indispensable to draw conclusions about the cognitive processes implicated in the resolution of a complex memory task.
