Neural Signatures of Semantic and Perceptual Memory Formation Become More Similar Across Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In adults, the contribution of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to memory encoding varies depending on the type of information being learned. Because these regions are still developing in children, their contribution to the formation of memories for different types of associations may differ from that of adults. Here, we examined how semantic and perceptual similarity between items affects memory behaviour and neural engagement in children (6-7 years) and adults. Participants completed a pair learning task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which pairs were perceptually or semantically related. Memory was tested outside the scanner with cued recall. Semantic similarity facilitated recall in both age groups, but more so in adults. Neurally, semantic pairs elicited broad frontoparietal activity while perceptual pairs engaged ventral visual and lateral prefrontal areas. Children showed more distinct neural responses to semantic versus perceptual pairs than adults, as well as more engagement in anterior hippocampus for semantic than perceptual pairs. These findings suggest that semantic similarity provides a powerful scaffold for memory across development, with age-related changes in memory encoding marked by a shift toward reliance on more integrated neural systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".