Abstract
Children have often been assumed to rely on familiarity in episodic memory retrieval, based on low source memory performance. However, the frontal familiarity-related event-related potential (ERP) correlate is typically absent in children, in contrast to a prominent parietal old/new effect reflecting recollection. Here, we presented identical and perceptually changed pictures after incidental and intentional encoding to assess whether (a) identical perceptual item features or (b) a high memory performance promoted by intentional encoding would elicit an ERP correlate associated with familiarity in 7-year-olds (N=20) and 10-year-olds (N=20). Despite generally high memory performance we observed frontal old/new effects in older children only, selectively for perceptually identical items after intentional encoding. By contrast, parietal old/new effects were observed in both groups. Furthermore, late parietal old/new effects were much smaller for changed items, suggesting that older children employed additional recollective search processes to differentiate between identical and changed items.
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