# Influence of brain maturation on memory representation during development

> **NIH NIH F32** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN · 2020 · $69,306

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
The transformation of memory from a system that stores discrete events to one that codes the commonalities
across related events is critical to higher-order cognition, enabling individuals to extend beyond direct
experience to support flexible behaviors such as reasoning, optimal decision making, and prospection.
Explicating how relational memory representation emerges across development not only has important
implications for memory behaviors (i.e., retrieval of past events), but impairments in memory formation are
also associated with academic outcome and several mental health disorders that onset before adulthood,
including depression, autism, and schizophrenia. Yet despite the critical need to elucidate how the neural
mechanisms underlying the formation of integrated memory traces emerges across development, measuring
the formation of integrated memories at the representational level has proved challenging. Consequently, no
study to date has examined the neural mechanisms driving the formation of integrated memories in
development. The proposed project will directly address this gap. It builds on theory and empirical work with
adults suggesting that the formation of integrated memories is supported by the anterior hippocampus (aHPC)
and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), as well as research showing that this aHPC-mPFC circuit continues to
develop through the third decade of life, thus underscoring the critical need to examine how changes in these
structures relates to the protracted emergence of memory integration. We predict that memory integration and
reasoning in childhood may therefore rely on a more effortful strategy supported by the posterior HPC (pHPC)
and lateral PFC (lPFC), wherein memories are represented separately from one another and then
recombined when necessary. In contrast to children, we hypothesize that adolescents will begin to rely on the
aHPC—mPFC network, but immature connection and rapid changes in development of these regions will lead
to less reliable memory integration, such that traces continue to be represented discretely. Through
completion of one experiment, children (7-8 years), adolescents (13-14 years), and adults (25-30 years) will
complete a paired associate inference task assessing memory integration (scanned) and subsequent
reasoning (not scanned). Multimodal neuroimaging techniques (structural MRI, high-resolution) and advanced
analysis methods (multi-voxel pattern analysis, relational similarity analysis) will be used to test the neural
mechanisms supporting memory integration (Aim 1) and how these mechanisms relate to representational
change with age (Aim 2). Results from this project would provide a substantial contribution to theory on the
neurocognitive development of representational capacities, and have the potential to provide critical insight
into interventions designed to improve complex behaviors that rely on memory integration, especially within
populations with defici...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10007869
- **Project number:** 5F32HD095586-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
- **Principal Investigator:** Nicole Leigh Varga
- **Activity code:** F32 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $69,306
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10007869

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10007869, Influence of brain maturation on memory representation during development (5F32HD095586-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10007869. Licensed CC0.

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