Most parents have experienced their preschool child having spontaneous episodic memories, that is, verbally reported memories of past events that come to the child almost out of the blue. Until recently such memories had only been observed outside the lab. By means of a new paradigm we report experimentally induced spontaneous memories of a unique event experienced one week earlier in 35- and 46-month-old children (N=110). At the first visit, half of the children experienced a Teddy event and the other half experienced a Game event. At the second visit the children's spontaneous utterances were recorded while waiting. The results revealed that the children talked spontaneously about the unique event experienced previously. Age showed no systematic effect on spontaneous episodic recollection, but there was a clear effect of age on subsequent control questions requiring strategic retrieval. The results support the idea of involuntary episodic remembering being a developmentally early achievement.

Childhood amnesia (i.e., a marked paucity of memories from the first 3-4 years of life) has often been examined by asking people for their earliest memory. Such studies have generally been conducted with college students, and thus been unable to examine possible effects of education and current age. We here report the first study on adults' earliest memories based on a large, stratified sample covering the adult life span from age 20 to 70 (n = 1,043). Because of the nature and size of our sample we have been able to investigate a range of factors simultaneously that typically have been studied separately in other studies. Participants with higher education reported earlier first memories than respondents with lower education. Women reported earlier memories than men. There was no interaction between gender and educational level. The current age of the respondents did not affect age of earliest memory, but older respondents had more vivid and more coherent earliest memories relative to younger respondents. Finally, the data provided some support for the claim that elaborative parents have children with earlier memories.

Many parents have experienced incidents in which their preschool child spontaneously (i.e., without prompting of any kind) recall a previously experienced event. Until recently, such spontaneous memories had only been examined in non-controlled settings (e.g., diary studies). Using a novel experimental paradigm, a previous study has shown that when young children are brought back to a highly distinct setting (same room, same experimenter, same furnishing), in which they previously experienced an interesting event (a Teddy or a Game event), spontaneous memories can be triggered. However, exactly which cues (or combination of cues) are effective for the children's memory, remains unknown. Here, we used this novel paradigm to examine the possible impact of contextual cues at the time of retrieval. We manipulated whether the 35-month-old children returned to the same room (n = 40) or to a different, but similarly furnished, room (n = 40) after one week. The results revealed that although the children returning to a new room produced fewer spontaneous memories than the children returning to the same room, the difference was not significant. Interestingly, despite changing rooms, the children still produced spontaneous memories. Taken together the results may shed new light on the mechanisms underlying childhood amnesia.

We introduce a new method for examining spontaneous (unprompted) autobiographical memories in 3.5-year-old children, by inducing them in a laboratory setting. Thirty-eight 3.5-year-olds, who had previously participated in a study in our lab involving highly unique props, were brought back after a one-month delay to the same lab arranged as in the original study and with the same Experimenter present. While waiting for the Experimenter in front of the props, their spontaneous verbalizations about the previous unique experiment were recorded, scored, and compared to those of 29 naïve Controls of the same age. The children in the experimental group produced significantly more spontaneous verbalizations related to the to-be-remembered event measured on a variety of dimensions. The study introduces a promising new approach to investigating spontaneous memories in young children in a controlled lab setting. The findings are discussed in relation to involuntary autobiographical memories as examined in adults.

The present study investigated the importance of Event Boundaries for 16- and 20-month-olds' (n=80) memory for cartoons. The infants watched one out of two cartoons with ellipses inserted covering the screen for 3s either at Event Boundaries or at Non-Boundaries. After a two-week delay both cartoons (one familiar and one novel) were presented simultaneously without ellipses while eye-tracking the infants. According to recent evidence a familiarity preference was expected. However, following Event Segmentation Theory ellipses at Event Boundaries were expected to cause greater disturbance of the encoding and hence a weaker memory trace evidenced by reduced familiarity preference, relative to ellipses at Non-Boundaries. The results suggest that overall this was the case, documenting the importance of Boundaries for infant memory. Furthermore, planned analyses revealed that whereas the same pattern was found when looking at the 20-month-old infants, no significant difference was found between the two conditions in the youngest age-group.