Commentary: Elucidating the neural correlates of early childhood memory

Both episodic memory and the key neural structure believed to support it, namely the hippocampus, are believed to undergo protracted periods of postnatal developmental. Critically however, the hippocampus is comprised of distinct subfields and circuits, and these circuits appear to mature at different rates (Lavenex and Banta Lavenex, 2013). Utilising what is currently understood about the functional significance of these circuits, Jabes and Nelson (2015) proposed an elegant neurocognitive model of the ontogeny of human memory that links the emergence of increasingly complex mnemonic processes with the protracted maturation of these discrete circuits. Whilst this approach has the potential to simultaneously drive forward our understanding of the ontogeny of early memory and our understanding of the functional significance of these hippocampal circuits, there is little direct evidence to support these links. In this commentary I discuss how utilising advanced neuroimaging techniques, which are now commonplace in the adult memory literature, could enable the numerous hypotheses presented in this model to be empirically tested.