Real-time assessment of looking time at central environmental cues for spontaneous recall in 35-month-olds

Abstract

Evidence supporting the assumption that spontaneous recall of previously experienced events is triggered by distinct, environmental cues has hitherto exclusively been based on post-hoc reasoning and not on direct, in vivo examination. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we present the first real-time analyses of 35-month-old’s looking time as spontaneous retrieval unfolds. Twenty-nine middle-to-higher SES children (out of 114 participating) spontaneously recalled having taken part in either a Teddy or a Game event (adjacently placed in two unique boxes) when returning to the lab one week later. Naïve coders registered looking time towards the two dissimilar looking boxes 10 s preceding spontaneous recall. The children having spontaneous recollections looked reliably longer at their Target box (relative to Foil), whereas this was not the case for a group of matched (by gender, event, and CDI) controls producing no spontaneous memories. The findings are important for understanding how visual attention facilitates spontaneous recall.