Developmental fMRI study of episodic verbal memory encoding in children.

Area of Science:

• Developmental cognitive neuroscience
• Child neurology

Background:

• Understanding brain maturation and cognitive function organization is key in child neurology and developmental cognitive neuroscience.
• Episodic memory encoding of verbal information in children has not been previously studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural correlates of verbal episodic memory encoding in children using fMRI.
• To examine age-related changes in brain activation during verbal memory encoding.

Main Methods:

• Event-related fMRI at 1.5-T was used to scan children aged 7–19 years during a verbal memory encoding task.
• Subsequent memory analysis and statistical parametric mapping (SPM2) were employed for whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses.
• Both intragroup and intergroup analyses were conducted on the entire sample and on age-divided subgroups.

Main Results:

• Behavioral memory performance was consistent across all age groups.
• Activation in the left hippocampus and bilateral basal ganglia during encoding decreased with increasing age.
• Left prefrontal cortex showed robust activation, but no age-modulated encoding-related activation was observed.

Conclusions:

• Verbal memory encoding shows a developmental pattern with declining hippocampal and basal ganglionic activation in older children.
• Lack of age-modulated prefrontal activation may reflect the delayed maturation of this brain region.
• This study provides the first fMRI evidence of verbal encoding function in children, with developmental and clinical relevance.