At What Age Do Children Begin To Show Self-reference Effect: A Comparative Study Between Epilepsy And Normal Children And An ERP Study Of The Self-related Memory Retrieval

Epilepsy is a common and diverse set of chronic neurological disorder characterized byseizures and it is characterized by an enduring predisposition to generate epileptic seizuresand by the neurobiological, cognitive, psychological, and social consequences of thiscondition. According to a survey conducted by Chinese Ministry of Health, there are about900million people who are diagnosed with epilepsy, of which about2/3are children. Theincidence of epilepsy in children is about3‰～6‰. As for the children who are in the maturestage of brain development, it can not be denied that epilepsy will affect their cognitive abilitysuch as perception, memory and language. Self reference memory plays a critical role inpeople’s daily life. Previous developmental psychological studies on self-reference memoryhave shown that5years old children can show self-reference effect. So as for epilepsychildren, when can they show self-reference effect? Is there any difference on self referencememory between epilepsy children and normal children? What are the ERPs characteristics ofself-related information retrieval? In trying to answer these questions, we conduct threeexperiments. And we hope that these experiments can provide an empirical basis for furtherinquiry of their cognitive defects and compensation principle.The study includes three experiments. In the first experiment, we adopted theself-reference effect paradigm developed by Zhu. In the paradigm, self or other face image areregarded as reference conditions and colorful object pictures are regarded as memorymaterials. The experiment includes two phases: learning and free recall. In the learning phase,colorful object pictures are presented together with self or other face image. Then incidentalfree recall was carried out, participants are normal children. Experiment two use the sameparadigm, but the participants are epilepsy children. In Experiment three, we adoptedthree-stimulus oddball paradigm, the target stimulus is the small circle, the standard stimulusis the big circle and two type of object(self owned object and other people owned object) areregarded as the distractive stimuli. Before the experiment, a shopping game is carried out inorder to establish participants’ sense of ownership. In the ERPs experiment, participants areasked to response to the target stimulus as quickly as they can. The results show that:(1)normal children can show self-reference effect at the age of5;(2) epilepsy children can show self-reference effect at the age of7;(3) compared with other people-related object,self-related object received preferential processing. And there was a right-lateralization of theeffect.