Child-centered memory conversations facilitate children’s episodic thinking

Abstract

Episodic thinking is involved in the representation of specific personal events occurring at a particular time and place. Although a fundamental human cognitive faculty directly associated with neurocognitive functioning, episodic thinking and its development is subject to sociocultural experiences. This study integrated experimental and longitudinal approaches to test the effect of training mothers to have child-centered memory conversations – the type of conversations frequently observed in Western families – on children’s episodic thinking. Six-year-old Chinese and European American children (N = 103) were pretested and randomly assigned to a maternal training or control condition. In the following 6 months, mothers were encouraged to share memories with their children, and those in the training condition were further asked to focus the conversation on their children’s thoughts, desires, and feelings. One year after the completion of training, children of training group mothers represented past and future events in greater episodic detail than those of control group mothers. These findings provide critical experimental evidence for the development of episodic thinking as a sociocultural process.