One thing follows another: Effects of temporal structure on 1- to 2-year-olds' recall of events.

Abstract

Investigated whether recall of events by children under 2 years of age is similar to that of older preschoolers and adults. Experiment 1 used elicited-imitation to test 16- and 20-month-olds' immediate and delayed recall (2-week delay) of familiar and novel events. Ordered recall at immediate and delayed test was superior for familiar events and for novel events with causal relations among the elements; ordered recall of novel events lacking causal relations was significantly lower. Experiment 2 tested children's sensitivity to differences in underlying structure of novel events. Nineteen-, 25-, and 31 -month-olds organized recall around causal relations, in spite of experimental manipulations that interrupted causally connected pairs of elements. The experiments provide clear evidence that, like preschoolers and adults, children as young as 16 months include temporal order information in their representations of both familiar and novel events and that the causal structure of novel events influences their recall. Research on children's memory has amply demonstrated that when children are working in a familiar and meaningful context, they exhibit memory skills far more advanced than they do when working in an unfamiliar context stripped of meaning. This lesson provided the impetus for research on children's memory for everyday events and routines. By interviewing 3- to 8-year-old children about their participation in everyday events, Nelson and her colleagues (e.g., Nelson, 1986; Nelson & Gruendel, 1981,1986) have shown that children as young as 3 years of age recall events in a fashion similar to that of older children and adults. The apparent similarities in the structure underlying the event representations of preschoolers and adults has led to the question of whether the event representations of even younger preverbal and early verbal children are similar as well. It is this question that provides the focus for the present research.