Episodic memories typically share overlapping elements in distinctive combinations, and to be valuable for future behavior they need to withstand delays. There is relatively little work on whether children have special difficulty with overlap or withstanding delay. However, Yim, Dennis, and Sloutsky (Psychological Science, 2013, Vol. 24, pp. 2163–2172) suggested that extensive overlap is more problematic for younger children, and Darby and Sloutsky (Psychological Science, 2015, Vol. 26, pp. 1937–1946) reported that a 48-h delay period actually improves children’s memory for overlapping pairs of items. In the current study, we asked how children’s episodic memory is affected by stimulus overlap, delay, and age using visual stimuli containing either overlapping or unique item pairs. Children aged 4 and 6 years were tested both immediately and after a 24-h delay. As expected, older children performed better than younger children, and both age groups performed worse on overlapping pairs. Surprisingly, the 24-h delay had only a marginal effect on overall accuracy. Although there were no interactions, when errors were examined, there was evidence that delay buffered memory for overlapping pairs against cross-contextual confusion for younger children.

情景记忆通常以独特的组合共享重叠的元素，并且对于未来的行为有价值，它们需要承受延迟。关于儿童是否在重叠或承受延迟方面有特殊困难的研究相对较少。然而，Yim、Dennis 和 Sloutsky ( Psychological Science, 2013, Vol. 24, pp. 2163–2172) 认为广泛重叠对年幼的孩子来说更成问题，而 Darby 和 Sloutsky ( Psychological Science,2015 年，卷。26, pp. 1937–1946) 报告说，48 小时的延迟时间实际上提高了儿童对重叠项目对的记忆。在当前的研究中，我们使用包含重叠或独特项目对的视觉刺激来询问儿童的情景记忆如何受到刺激重叠、延迟和年龄的影响。立即和延迟 24 小时后对 4 岁和 6 岁的儿童进行测试。正如预期的那样，年龄较大的孩子比年幼的孩子表现更好，两个年龄组在重叠配对上的表现更差。令人惊讶的是，24 小时延迟对整体准确性的影响很小。虽然没有交互，但在检查错误时，有证据表明重叠对的延迟缓冲记忆可以防止年幼儿童的跨上下文混淆。