The Influence of Reward Anticipation on Episodic Memory Among 6- to 9-Year-Old Children: An ERP Study

Research examining the effects of reward anticipation on episodic memory has primarily focused on adults. It is unclear how reward affects episodic memory among early school-aged children. Therefore, this study employed a study-recognition paradigm with reward and no-reward cues to investigate the influence of reward anticipation on episodic memory in children aged 6-9 years (n = 31), and recorded EEG to reveal the underlying neural mechanisms. Behaviorally, reward anticipation significantly improved the recognition memory accuracy of the child participants. Analyses of the encoding phase revealed that the amplitudes of the P1 and P3 components were significantly larger for rewarded items than for non-rewarded items, indicating stronger selective attention to rewarded items as well as children allocating more cognitive resources to learning rewarded items. Furthermore, we observed significant differences in the amplitudes of the N400 and SW components between rewarded and non-rewarded items, suggesting that children engaged in more detailed encoding processes for rewarded items. In the retrieval phase, we observed a significant reward effect in the 600-800 ms time window at the left centro-posterior electrodes, while in the 300-500 ms and 500-1000 ms time windows, parietal old/new effects were observed. This indicates that children's information retrieval may have primarily relied on recollection, with reward anticipation enhancing recollection. Overall, our study provides new evidence for the neural mechanisms underlying the enhancement of children's episodic memory through reward anticipation.