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Mother–child memory conversations are a nuanced and important factor in children's memory development. The current study focuses on maternal characteristics that are related to individual differences in maternal elaborative style. It also examines the role of maternal elaborative style in children's elaborativeness in the context of reminiscing and recounting. Two hundred and nine Turkish mothers (Mage= 36.32, SD = 4.99) and their 5- to 6-year-olds (Mage in months = 66.88, SD = 4.04) (110 girls, 99 boys) participated in the current study. Results revealed that maternal individuation and balanced self-construal type predicted maternal elaborativeness, which in turn predicted child elaborativeness in reminiscing and recounting. Yet, such a relation was not observed for maternal attachment styles or sensitivity. Findings suggested the importance of maternal individuation and balanced self-construal for mothers' and children's elaborativeness in memory conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perceive the world with our five senses. However, the role that these five senses play in early childhood memories has received relatively little attention. Against this background, participants (N = 117) were asked to write down their earliest childhood memories for the five senses and to answer additional questions regarding these memories. There was no significant difference between the five senses regarding the percentage of participants reporting a memory or between the valence and the subjective reliability of the reported memories. However, memories reported for sight were marginally longer, from a younger age, and estimated to be more important compared to memories reported for the other senses. A qualitative content analysis revealed that the vast majority of the reported memories fell into a limited number of categories. Interestingly, several categories played a role in more than one sense. Nevertheless, the reported memories also mirrored the characteristic properties that one is able to perceive with each sense. Overall, the findings support the notion that sight is the dominant sense. At the same time, they remind us that each sense provides us with unique information about ourselves and the world around us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Episodic memory has been tested in non-human animals using depletion paradigms that assess recollection for the “what”, “where” and “when” (i.e., how long ago). This paradigm has not been used with human children, yet doing so would provide another means to explore their episodic memory development. Using a depletion paradigm, preschool-aged children were presented in two trials with a preferred food that was only edible after a short interval and a less-preferred food that was edible after the short and long intervals. Younger (mean = 40 months) and older (mean = 65 months) children tended to choose their preferred food after the short intervals, but did not switch to selecting their less-preferred food after the long intervals. Importantly, their choices did not differ with age. Although older children better remembered “what”, “where”, and “what is where” than did younger children, neither age group successfully estimated “how long ago” an event occurred. Finally, both age groups spontaneously recalled information about Trial 1. We also analysed the relation between the different measures used in the study but no clear patterns emerged. Results are discussed with respect to the cognitive mechanisms necessary to succeed in depletion paradigms and the measurement of episodic memory more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans possess the unique ability to mentally travel backward in time to re-experience past events (i.e., episodic memory) and forward in time to pre-experience future events (i.e., episodic foresight). Although originally viewed as different cognitive skills, they are now both viewed as components of the episodic memory system. Recently, it has been suggested that the episodic system may allow us to not only pre-experience and predict our own future but also that of another person. In the current study, we investigate this possibility by examining the ability of three- and four-year-old children to plan for their own future and for that of another person. We found that both three- and four-year-old children performed equally, when planning for their own future or when planning for the experimenter's future. These data are consistent with the finding that planning for someone else's future recruits the same neural structures that are used when planning for one's own future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple retrievals of a memory over a spaced manner improve long-term memory performance in infants, children, younger and older adults; however, few studies have examined spacing effects with young school-age children. To expand the understanding of the spacing benefit in children, the current study presented weakly associated English word-pairs to children aged 7–11 and cued their recall two times immediately (massed), after a delay of 5 or 10 items (spaced) or not at all (control). After this encoding session with or without two retrievals, participants were tested two times for memory of all word-pairs: immediately and 30 minutes after the encoding session. Multiple retrievals significantly improved memory on the tests. However, words repeated in a spaced design were remembered at higher rates than those that were massed, while gap size between repetitions (5 or 10) did not differentially impact performance. The data show that a within-session spacing strategy can benefit children's ability to remember word-pairs after 30 minutes. Thus, asking students to recall what they have learned within a lesson is a technique that can be used in a classroom to improve long-term recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effect of narrative organisation at encoding on long-term episodic memory in a sample of five- to seven-year-old children (N= 113). At an initial interview, children were asked to narrate a story from a picture book. Six months later, they were interviewed again and asked to recall the story and answer a series of direct questions about the story. Children who initially encoded more information in narrative and produced more complete, complex, cohesive and coherent narratives remembered the story in greater detail and accuracy following the six-month interval, independent of age and verbal skills. The relation between narrative organisation and memory was consistent across culture and gender. These findings provide new insight into the critical role of narrative in episodic memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 48 preschoolers (ages 3, 4, and 5) received four tasks modelled after prior work designed to assess the development of “episodic foresight”. For each task, children encountered a problem in one room and, after a brief delay, were given the opportunity in a second room to select an item to solve the problem. Importantly, after selecting an item, children were queried about their memory for the problem. Age-related changes were found both in children's ability to select the correct item and their ability to remember the problem. However, when we controlled for children's memory for the problem, there were no longer significant age-related changes on the item choice measure. These findings suggest that age-related changes in children's performance on these tasks are driven by improvements in children's memory versus improvements in children's future-oriented thinking or “foresight” per se. Our results have important implications for how best to structure tasks to measure children's episodic foresight, and also for the relative role of memory in this task and in episodic foresight more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Relational memory is a canonical form of episodic memory known to rely on the hippocampus. Several lines of evidence suggest that relational memory has a developmental trajectory in which it is fragile, inflexible, and error-prone until around 6 years of age, which seems to mirror maturational changes in the morphology of the hippocampus. However, recent findings from Richmond and Nelson (2009) challenge this idea as they provide evidence suggestive of adult-like relational memory in 9-month-old infants. In this study the authors measured the eye movements of infants and showed that they preferentially gazed at correct, as opposed to incorrect, face–scene pairings at test. The goal of the present study was to evaluate the development of relational memory by assessing 4-year-olds using Richmond and Nelson's task and stimuli, but gathering two dependent measures of relational memory: overt response as well as eye movements. The results show that, overall, preferential looking at correct face–scene pairings was at chance; however, preferential looking was observed when the correct face–scene pair was later explicitly identified. Thus, while eye movements do index explicit memory in 4-year-olds, behavioural data are necessary to obtain a full picture of the development of relational memory in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that manipulating the wording of the forget cue in list-method directed forgetting affects the magnitude of directed forgetting both in younger children (Aslan, Staudigl, Samenieh, & Bauml, in press) and in older adults (Sahakyan, Delaney, & Goodmon, 2008). This occurs when the forget cue overemphasises the importance of forgetting in the current context. The present experiment investigated whether de-emphasising forgetting affected the magnitude of list-method directed forgetting in college adults. Some participants received overt forget cues that explicitly instructed them to forget earlier studied items, whereas others received covert forget cues that implied forgetting by emphasising selective remembering (e.g., 'you will only need to remember some of the items'). Results indicated equivalent directed forgetting for both types of cues. However, regardless of the type of cue received, participants who reported using specific forgetting strategies in response to the forget cue showed directed forgetting, whereas those that reported doing nothing did not show any effects. The results underscore that successful directed forgetting requires engagement of controlled processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often, when children testify in court they do so as victims of a repeated offence and must report details of an instance of the offence. One factor that may influence children's ability to succeed in this task concerns the temporal distance between presentations of the repeated event. Indeed, there is a substantial amount of literature on the “spacing effect” that suggests this may be the case. In the current research, we examined the effect of temporal spacing on memory reports for complex autobiographical events. Children participated in one or four play sessions presented at different intervals. Later, children were suggestively questioned, and then participated in a memory test. Superior recall of distributed events (a spacing effect) was found when the delay to test was 1 day (Experiment 1) but there was little evidence for a spacing effect when the delay was 1 week (Experiment 2). Implications for understanding children's recall of repeated autobiographical events are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the question of whether memories from early childhood survive into later childhood, participants visited the laboratory at age 3 and again at 7, 8, or 9. At age 3, each talked with a parent about six events; at the later age each child talked with a researcher about four of these distant events as well as two more recent events. School‐aged children recalled fewer than half of the distant events introduced. Further, the proportion of distant events recalled was negatively correlated with age. Those distant events that were recalled, however, were recounted in an accurate, detailed manner. Importantly, reports of distant events did not reflect the full extent of children's narrative ability. Reports of recent events were more coherent and included twice the detail. Implications for existing interpretations of autobiographical memory and childhood amnesia are discussed, and the need for further research employing innovative methods is emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We modified Bruce, Dolan, and Phillips-Grant's (2000) threshold procedure for determining the wane of childhood amnesia. In two experiments, undergraduates labelled childhood events (e.g., your first permanent tooth came in) as know or recollect memories and estimated their age at the event's occurrence. In both studies the estimated transition from mostly know memories to mostly recollect memories was roughly 4.7 years. This transition estimate was replicated in a sample of adults (ages 24-65 years) with both Bruce et al.'s event-generation task and the Experiment 1a questionnaire. By contrast, in two experiments a transition estimate of roughly 6 years was found for undergraduates' memories of public events (e.g., the Challenger explosion). The wane of childhood amnesia appears to occur around 4.7 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment examined 24- and 30-month-olds' understanding of photographs as reminders using a deferred imitation paradigm. The 24- and 30-month-olds visited a laboratory playroom and observed an experimenter demonstrating novel activities. Upon returning after a retention interval, half of the children viewed photographs depicting the activities they had viewed during their first visits as reminders of the event, as well as photographs of activities they had never seen. Children in both the reminder and the noreminder groups were then asked to complete the originally modelled activities as a test of recall. Results indicate that although 30-month-olds recalled more activities than did 24-month-olds, children in the reminder condition at both ages recalled more activities than children in the no-reminder control condition. Results are discussed in terms of the development of representational understanding and long-term recall in young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments investigated the contribution of phonological short-term memory to the processing of spoken sentences by 4- and 5-year-old children. In Experiment 1, sentences contained either short or longer words, and varied in syntactic structure. Overall, repetition but not comprehension of the sentences was significantly influenced by word length. In Experiment 2, children selected on the basis of their high phonological short-term memory ability were founded to be superior at repeating sentences to children of lower phonological short-term memory ability, although the two groups did not differ in their comprehension accuracy for the same sentences. In both experiments, comprehension and repetition performance were differently influenced by particular sentence structures. It is proposed that sentence repetition in children is constrained by phonological memory capacity, and is therefore directly influenced by memory-related factors that include the length and number of words in sentences, and individual differences in memory skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's performance on tests of visuo-spatial working memory improves with age, although relatively little is known about why this happens. One explanation concerns the development of the ability to recode visually presented information into phonological form. This process appears to be used from around 8 years of age and is a major contributor to tasks in which stimuli can be verbally labelled. However, evidence suggests that phonological recoding cannot account for all of the age-related change in performance on visuo-spatial working memory tasks. In this review, four other mechanisms (knowledge, processing strategies, processing speed, and attentional capacity) are considered in terms of their contribution to children's visuo-spatial working memory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working memory performance was examined in children aged 11–12 years who had borderline, mild, and moderate learning disabilities. Comparisons with children of average abilities were used to determine whether those with more severe learning disabilities had greater impairments in working memory. Seven measures of working memory span were used to assess temporary phonological short-term storage (digit span, word span), temporary visuo-spatial short-term storage (pattern span, spatial span), and temporary short-term storage with additional processing, or central executive, demands (listening span, odd one out span, reverse digit span). Children with mild and moderate learning disabilities were impaired on all measures of working memory compared to children of average abilities. Children with borderline learning disabilities were just as good as children with average abilities on visuo-spatial and complex span tasks, but showed an impairment on phonological span tasks. Children with moderate learning disabilities were indistinguishable from children with mild learning disabilities on simple span tasks, but were significantly poorer than the mild group on the more demanding complex span tasks. For the group as a whole, working memory was strongly related to mental age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is clear that children generalise their knowledge of events from one instantiation to another. The means by which generalisation is accomplished are unclear. In three experiments, we used elicited imitation of multi-step sequences to test whether 25-month-olds' generalisation occurs as a function of forgetting of the features of the original event. Experiment 1 was an initial test of generalisation from one version of an event to another version involving perceptually different yet functionally analogous props. After a 1-week delay, children showed evidence of generalisation by enacting the event using the analogous props. Experiment 2 was a within-subject test of generalisation and memory for the original version of an event. After a 1-week delay, when paired with unrelated distractor props, analogous props served as effective retrieval cues; when paired with the original props, analogous props were treated as functionally equivalent to unrelated distractors. This within-subject reversal in the functional role of analogous props is compelling evidence that children's event representations include specific features and, at the same time, are generalisable. In Experiment 3, children showed evidence of generalisation immediately after exposure to an event, thereby making clear that generalisation occurs even in the face of robust memory for the specific features of the original event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, we examined cross-cultural and gender differences in adults' earliest memories. To do this, we asked male and female adults from three cultural backgrounds (New Zealand European, New Zealand Maori, and Asian) to describe and date their earliest personal memory. Consistent with past research, Asian adults reported significantly later memories than European adults, however this effect was due exclusively to the extremely late memories reported by Asian females. Maori adults, whose traditional culture includes a strong emphasis on the past, reported significantly earlier memories than adults from the other two cultural groups. Across all three cultures, the memories reported by women contained more information than the memories reported by men. These findings support the view that the age and content of our earliest memories are influenced by a wide range of factors including our culture and our gender. These factors must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of autobiographical memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cross-sectional study using children aged 3 to 7 years and a cross-sequential study using children aged between 5 and 8 years showed that the development of phonological recoding in working memory was more complex than the simple dichotomous picture portrayed in the current literature. It appears that initially children use no strategy in recall, which is proposed to represent the level of automatic activation of representations in long-term memory and the storage capacity of the central executive. This is followed by a period in which a visual strategy prevails, followed by a period of dual visual–verbal coding before the adult-like strategy of verbal coding finally emerges. The results are discussed in terms of three working memory models (Baddeley, 1990; Engle, 1996; Logie, 1996) where strategy use is seen as the development of attentional processes and phonological recoding as the development of inhibitory mechanisms in the central executive to suppress the habitual response set of visual coding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testimonies from 488 children given to the priests of the parish of Rattvik during a preliminary investigation of a Swedish witch panic in 1670-71 are examined in relation to records from parish catechetical meetings held in 1671. The result implies that children who knew and understood at least parts of Luther's catechism were less liable to have falsely alleged that they had been kidnapped by female satanists during the witch panic of the previous year. It is suggested that these effects were caused by differences in cognitive, social, and emotional resources among these children as compared to those who were unable to learn and understand any parts of Luther's catechism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments investigated the development of the word length effect in children aged 4 to 10 years, comparing auditory and visual stimuli. The question addressed was whether word length effects emerged earlier with auditory presentation or visual presentation, or whether they emerged at the same age regardless of presentation modality. Results provided evidence that word length effects emerge earlier with visual than auditory presentation. The implication of our results is that with visual presentation, 4-year-olds engage in some form of verbalisation strategy that involves obtaining phonological representations of picture names and mapping them on to articulatory output plans. This strategy is clearly verbal in nature, but is not necessarily characterised as cumulative verbal rehearsal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults who had previously answered questions about a sibling's birth experienced when they were 2 or 3 years old were asked the same question again after a oneyear interval. The results showed considerable consistency in reported memories. The majority of answers given on the second occasion provided substantially the same information as on the first occasion. However, those who were only just 2 years old when their sibling was born recalled less information overall and showed less consistency in their answers. A second group of adults was asked for a second time about a family birth for which they could have no memory. They also produced answers that were consistent with those given before, but there was no age effect in the consistency of their responses. The implications of these patterns of consistency are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By late in the first year of life, children show temporally ordered recall of event sequences, the orders of which are constrained by enabling relations; they do not reliably recall arbitrarily ordered events. Using elicited imitation, in two experiments, we examined age-and experience-related changes in young children's recall of events, the orders of which are arbitrary. The changes were found to have implications for the efficacy of verbal reminding and to be related to developments in language. Specifically, on the basis of a single experience, 16-month-olds did not accurately recall arbitrarily ordered event sequences either immediately or after a two-week delay (Experiment 1); 22-month-olds recalled the events immediately, but not after the delay; by 28 months, children recalled the events even after the delay (Experiment 2A). This development was accompanied by changes in the ability to benefit from verbal reminders: 28-month-olds' recall was facilitated by provision of verbal reminders, whereas that of the younger children was not. Moreover, age-related changes in accurate reproduction of lengthy arbitrarily ordered event sequences were found to be related to developments in language (Experiment 2B). Critically, the limitations on 1-year-olds' performance that are overcome with age are not absolute: After three experiences, 16-month-olds accurately recalled the events after a two-week delay; their recall was facilitated by verbal reminders (Experiment 1). The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]