“I can’t remember!” Three-year-olds struggle to strategically access encoded and consolidated memories

Abstract

We examined three-year-olds’ (N = 50) strategic recall of past events from their daily life that they recently had recalled spontaneously. Hence, in contrast to most research on memories of past events in young children, we had evidence that the events had been encoded and consolidated. Moreover, we examined whether the age of the to-be-remembered events as well as language skills would affect the strategic recall. The results showed that even though the children’s answers were coded exceedingly ‘liberal’, the children were unable to provide strategic recall in 51% of the cases. Language skills affected their performance, whereas the age of the to-be-remembered events and time since last remembrance did not. These results highlight the cognitive constraints related to the deliberate search process required when responding to direct questions concerning past events and add to the understanding of retrieval mechanisms in young children, by underscoring the advantage of spontaneous recall.