Young Children's Recall Research Articles

Emotion and gesture effects on narrative recall in young children and adults

AbstractResearch with children and adults suggests verbal references to negative emotion support narrative recall. To date, however, the effects of gesture on emotion recall have been ignored. Children (4–6 years) and adults viewed videos containing negatively valenced, positively valenced, and emotionally neutral stories. The narrator provided gestures reflecting the bodily state of the protagonist (negative emotion, positive emotion or neutral state), the main story event, or no gestures. Children and adults recalled more negative emotions than positive emotions or neutral states. For children, state gestures facilitated state‐related recall, and event gestures facilitated event‐related recall. For adults, state gestures did not impact recall, whereas event gestures weakened recall. For both age groups, gesture's benefits remained consistent across emotional valence. Results suggest emotional valence is not critical in determining whether viewing gestures facilitates narrative recall, with important implications for deciding how and when to use gestures to best assist listeners' recall.

Altered video task: a non-verbal measure of what-who-where recall in young children

ABSTRACTThis report aims to introduce, test and discuss a new method of measuring episodic memory in participants with highly restricted verbal abilities. Although an elicited/deferred imitation paradigm has already proposed a successful method of measuring this capacity in infants as young as 6 months old [Bauer, Patricia J. 2006. “Constructing a Past in Infancy: A Neuro-Developmental Account.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (4): 175–181], it failed to include a measure of capacities crucial for episodic recall, that is: a sense of self, a sense of subjective time and autonoetic consciousness [Tulving, Endel. 2002. “Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain.” Annual Reviews Psychology 53: 1–25]. We combined developmental and comparative approaches in the altered video task to allow for simultaneous measuring of episodic recall and autonoetic consciousness. Episodic recall was measured via presentation of non-modified and modified recordings of a personal past event after a 24-h delay. The 15-month-old infants were expected to watch the modified video significantly longer than the non-modified video, and so evince the differentiation between them. Alongside, the infants participated in a mirror-mark task (a standard measure of self-recognition) and in a real-time video task (a possible alternative for the mirror-mark task). Results for ‘what’ and ‘who’ were consistent with our expectations. All results, their implications and possible future directions are discussed.

In My Shoes – Validation of a computer assisted approach for interviewing children

Interviewing young children presents a challenge because they tend to provide incomplete accounts and are easily misled. Therefore there is a need for techniques to improve young children's recall, while maintaining accuracy and increasing completeness.The computer-assisted interview In My Shoes (IMS) is an aid that potentially offers a way for young children to provide accounts of their experiences. This study examined the validity of IMS, by comparing it with a forensic best practice interview approach using a real-life clinical situation to ensure high ecological validity. Children were randomly assigned to either method and both accuracy and completeness of statements made by 4- and 5-year-olds (N=54) regarding a video-documented health check-up were assessed.The In My Shoes interviews were as good as best practice interviews on all accuracy measures for both age groups, except for object accuracy that was better in the forensic interview condition. Events description completeness was similar in both interview conditions; however, IMS interviews generated more complete statements about people present at the visit. The findings suggest that the IMS approach yields comparable results to a best practice interview, and it can be used as an alternative aid in child interviews.

Effects of Motivation on Young Children's Object Recall and Strategy Use

ABSTRACTThe study was designed to examine the effects of motivation on young children's recall for object names and early-emerging mnemonic activities. Seventy-two 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 instructional conditions: incidental, intentional, or motivational. Each child was shown 10 small toy objects and provided a 90 s study period prior to recall. The children's mnemonic behaviors were videotaped for subsequent coding. The children in the incidental condition were instructed to simply look at the toys while children in the intentional and motivational condition were given explicit instructions to remember. The motivational group was also told that they could keep whichever toys they remembered. A recognition memory task was employed to examine the extent to which the stimuli were encoded during the study period. The children's recall memory did not vary as a function of instructional condition. Children's use of singular versus multiple strategies was calculated, along with a weighted summary score giving most weight to the participant's use of mature mnemonic strategies. Significant differences in strategy use were found, favoring the motivational condition. Significant positive correlations were found between the weighted summary scores and object recall, and the teacher ratings of mastery motivation and object recall. Mastery motivation was found to be unrelated to the strategic summary scores, failing to mediate strategic behaviors. The results suggest that when providing incentives to remember, children apparently engaged in more effortful mnemonic processing in order to remember the items, even though a greater number of items were not recalled.

The good, the bad, and the neutral: The influence of emotional valence on young children's recall

Despite the important theoretical and applied implications, there is limited experimental research investigating the influence of emotional valence on young children's verbal recall of everyday emotional experiences. This issue was addressed in the current study. Specifically, we investigated young children's (5–6 years) recall of emotional experiences presented in six brief stories. To address methodological limitations of the small body of existing literature, we adopted a within participants design in which story content was matched and valence (positive, negative, neutral) was counterbalanced across stories. Fifty-four children were presented the six stories via narrated slideshow, and recall was assessed after delay. Results showed that emotional stories were better recalled than neutral stories and negatively valenced stories were better recalled than positively valenced stories. The recall advantage of negatively valenced information was found for all aspects of each story, suggesting that negative valence renders events particularly memorable.

Effects of spontaneous elaboration on delayed recall in young children

Effects of spontaneous elaboration on delayed recall in young children

“Family Stories” and Their Implications for Preschoolers’ Memories of Personal Events

Most adults experience childhood amnesia: They have very few memories of events prior to 3 to 4 years of age. Nevertheless, some early memories are retained. Multiple factors likely are responsible for the survival of early childhood memories, including external representations such as videos, photographs, and conversations about past experiences, which help sustain memories over time. The present research was an experimental test of whether repeated recounting of past events influences young children's recall during a year delay. Twenty-four mothers and their 4-year-old children talked repeatedly about two randomly selected personal events that were assigned to become family-story events. Mothers were asked not to initiate conversations about two other randomly selected events (control events). A year later, children were interviewed by an experimenter about all four events. In free recall, children retrieved more of the family-story than the control events. With the aid of Wh- questions, levels of retrieval no longer differed. Moreover, the completeness and organization of children's narratives did not depend on whether they were about family-story or control events. The pattern of results suggests that repeated conversations about a past event help to maintain accessibility of the memory but may not substantially impact the integrity of the memory trace itself. The role of family stories in children's social and autobiographical memory development is discussed.

Phonological, visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span

Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual similarity, semantic similarity, and word length. Older children (6/8-year-olds), but not younger children (4/5-year-olds), demonstrated robust and consistent phonological similarity and word length effects, indicating that they were using phonological coding strategies. This confirmed findings initially reported by Conrad (1971), but subsequently questioned by other authors. However, in contrast to some previous research, little evidence was found for a distinct visual coding stage at 4 years, casting doubt on assumptions that this is a developmental stage that consistently precedes phonological coding. There was some evidence for a dual visual and phonological coding stage prior to exclusive use of phonological coding at around 5-6 years. Evidence for semantic similarity effects was limited, suggesting that semantic coding is not a key method by which young children recall lists of pictures.

An experimental evaluation of the effects of using training sentences to aide young children's word recall

Using a task that is similar to real-world early reading of environmental print, this study explored how two encoding conditions impacted young children's ability to remember names associated with symbols. Sixty-five children from prekindergarten (n = 20), kindergarten (n = 20), and first grade (n = 25) were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group. Both groups heard 15 words accompanied by 15 black-and-white line drawings, but the experimental group also heard training sentences. Results indicated that the experimental group had significantly poorer recall accuracy for the symbol names when compared with the control group. Older children in both groups were found to be more effective than younger children at the symbol naming task. Practical applications and theoretical implications are discussed.

Drawings as memory aids: Optimising the drawing method to facilitate young children's recall

There has been supportive evidence of drawing facilitating young children's event recall. The present study investigated whether additional event details are recalled if the interviewer uses interactive questions in response to information children have spontaneously drawn or verbally reported. Eighty 5- to 6-year-olds were shown a video clip of a novel event and were interviewed the following day. The children were randomly allocated to one of four recall conditions: tell-only, draw-and-tell, interactive draw-and-tell and interactive tell-only. The children's verbal reports were transcribed and scored on four different categories of recall: items (objects and people), actions, colours and sayings. The interactive draw-and-tell group recalled more correct information for items compared to the other three recall groups, without any accompanying increase in errors. We propose that drawing increases the opportunity for the interviewer to ask interactive questions, which in turn facilitates children's accurate recall of item information. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Working memory and short-term sentence recall in young children

The primary objective of this study was to investigate links between phonological memory and short-term sentence recall. Errors in immediate sentence recall were compared for children with relatively good and relatively poor phonological short-term memory skills, matched on general nonverbal ability. The results indicate marked differences in the overall accuracy of recall between the two groups, with the high phonological memory group making fewer errors in sentence recall. Although the frequency of the different types of errors (lexical substitutions and nonsubstitutions) differed significantly between the groups, the serial position profiles of sentence recall accuracy was similar. Both groups were also more likely to substitute target words with synonyms rather than unrelated words, a finding suggesting that mechanisms responsible for maintaining semantic information may also play an important role in performance of sentence recall tasks.

Interviewing young children with props: prior experience matters

AbstractThis study investigated the effects of prior experience with props used during an interview on young children's recall of an event. In a one‐way design, we interviewed 4‐year‐old children 1 to 2 days after they participated in a staged event. One group of children played with toy replicas of items from the event prior to an interview with the toy props. Another group matched toy replicas to real items from the event prior to an interview with the toy props. A third group coloured before an interview with the toy props, and a fourth coloured before an interview with the real items. Finally, a fifth group coloured before an interview with no props, only verbal cues about the items that had been present. Results indicated that the condition in which children played with toy props prior to the interview had the lowest verbal accuracy during the interview. Children who saw toys for the first time during the interview behaviourally enacted the highest volume of correct information about the event. Implications for interviewing children are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reinstatement of 2-year-olds' event memory using photographs

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 no-reminder 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.

Retrieval of Episodic Information From Memory: Comparisons Among 3- and 4-Year-Olds, 7- and 8-Year-Olds, and Adults

Young children's and adults' recall of episodic information was explored in 4 experiments. The task required participants to recall a target noun presented as the last item of a 4-noun string of related (either categorically or thematically) or unrelated words. Providing all 3 preceding nouns or a subset of them cued recall. Experiment 1 found that 7- and 8-year-old children's recall was better with pictures as opposed to text, and children showed performance equal to adults with thematically related pictorial stimuli. Using pictorial stimuli, Experiment 2 showed that the number of cues present at retrieval affected 7- and 8-year-olds' recall. Experiments 3 and 4 tested recall of episodic information in 3- and 4-year-olds using pictorial stimuli. The results suggested that young children also have access to episodic information in memory and the number of cues present at retrieval influenced recall. The findings are discussed in the context of children's memory for events.

The relationship between interview characteristics and accuracy of recall in young children: do individual differences matter?

The relationship between interview characteristics and accuracy of recall in young children, as mediated by child characteristics, was examined. The interview characteristics included preinterview instructions and level of questioning. Fifty-six children ranging from ages 3 to 6 years participated in a Circus Day event and were interviewed 10 days later. Following either instructions or filler questions, children were questioned about the event. Results indicated that based on several individual difference factors, young children varied significantly in the accuracy of their interviews and their ability to resist misleading questions. However, individual differences did not mediate children's ability to benefit from different question types or preinterview instructions. As a whole, children provided limited information to the most open-ended questions and more correct information to highly structured questions. In contrast to the research with older children, younger children did not benefit from preinterview instructions. Suggestions for future research and implications for investigative interviews in the field of child abuse are discussed.

When Even Arbitrary Order Becomes Important: Developments in Reliable Temporal Sequencing of Arbitrarily Ordered Events

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.

Validation of the Multiple-pass 24-hour Dietary Recall in Young Children; In-person Vs. Telephone Administered Interviews

LEARNING OUTCOME: To examine the effectiveness of two different methods (telephone vs. in-person) of collecting energy intake data using the multiple-pass 24-hour dietaryWhen considering the growing problem of childhood obesity, it is important to be able to accurately measure both sides of the energy balance equation (energy intake and energy expenditure). This study examined the intake portion of the equation and validated two methods of obtaining dietary intake data. The purpose of this study was to compare interviewing methods when collecting intake data from young children using the multiple-pass 24-hour dietary recall. Both an in-person interview and a telephone administered interview were used to collect energy intake data. The validity of these two methods was assessed by comparing their values to the total energy expenditure (TEE) as determined using doubly labeled water method. When subjects are in energy balance, TEE can be used as a reference standard because energy intake is essentially the same as energy expenditure. The subjects were 10 volunteers (3 males, 7 females), aged 4-7. The volunteers were studied at the University of Vermont, Clinical Research Center/Sims Obesity Nutrition Research Center. No significant difference was found when comparing telephone and in-person interviewing methods with TEE (F=1.77, p=0.23). Thus, telephone administered multiple-pass 24-hour dietary recalls can be just as effective as a multiple-pass 24-hour dietary recall obtained from an in-person interview.

What is the impact of knowing that a rose is a rose: Effects of verbal information on young children's recall of events

What is the impact of knowing that a rose is a rose: Effects of verbal information on young children's recall of events

Time as an ally of memory: The influence of temporal order information on very young children's recall of events

Time as an ally of memory: The influence of temporal order information on very young children's recall of events

Recall of related and unrelated gender-typed item pairs by young children

Aspects of 40 young children's (22 boys, 18 girls; mean age = 51.00 months) recall of related and unrelated item pairs were assessed. Children were primarily white and middle SES. Consistent with previous recall research, boys recalled significantly more pairs, and individual items from pairs, of related gender-typed items than pairs containing unrelated items. Girls recalled significantly more pairs, and individual items from pairs, of related animal items than any other types of related or unrelated pairings. Congruent with the component model of gender role knowledge development, girls showed significantly greater recall of pairs, and individual items from pairs, of same-sex feminine item pairs than other-sex masculine ones. Consistent with previous memory research examining young children's pair recall, boys demonstrated significantly better recall of pairs, and individual items from pairs, containing related same-sex masculine items than pairs with two unrelated items. These data suggest young children conceptualize gender roles as social categories to organize processing of social information.