Developmental Differences in the Ability to Provide Temporal Information About Repeated Events

Abstract

. (2015). Developmental differences in the ability to provide temporal information associated with an instance of a repeated event. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29,[407][408][409][410][411][412][413][414][415][416][417] We are grateful to the children, parents and schools who participated, and to the numerous TEMPORAL MEMORY OF A REPEATED EVENT 3 AbstractChildren (n = 372) aged 4 -8 years participated in 1 or 4 occurrences of a similar event and were interviewed 1 week later. Compared to 85% of children who participated once, less than 25% with repeated experience gave the exact number of times they participated, although all knew they participated more than once. Children with repeated experience were asked additional temporal questions and there were clear developmental differences. Older children were more able than younger children to judge relative order and temporal position of the four occurrences.They also demonstrated improved temporal memory for the first and last relative to the middle occurrences, while younger children did so only for the first. This is the first systematic demonstration of children's memory for temporal information after a repeated event. We discuss implications for theories of temporal memory development and the practical implications of asking children to provide temporal information.

The “when” and the “where” of single‐trial allocentric spatial memory performance in young children: Insights into the development of episodic memory

“…Importantly, old low‐performing children exhibited an intermediate performance, making many more temporal resolution errors than old high‐performing children. Our findings are thus consistent with those of (Roberts et al, ) concerning the impairments that young children have in forming clear memory representations of repeated events, but further suggest that these difficulties arise during encoding or the earliest stages of consolidation, as our task's intertrial interval was a few minutes rather than hours or days.…”

“…There is a relatively large literature concerning the temporal coding of children's event memories. Briefly, whereas children as young as 4 years of age are capable of distinguishing between relatively recent and less recent events (i.e., making temporal distance judgments (Friedman, )), children even up to 8 years of age have difficulty in temporally sequencing individual instances of a repeated event (compared to one‐time events (Roberts et al, )). Nevertheless, and similar to spatial memory, children's temporal coding of unique events improves between 3 and 8 years of age (Drummey & Newcombe, ; Hayne & Imuta, ).…”

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“…It was expected that most of the minimally verbal adults in our sample would be able to respond to the "one time or more than one time" question. Roberts et al (2015) found that none of the 4-to 8-year-old children in their analogue study answered it incorrectly (even though they made mistakes in response to the cued recall question about the precise number of times).…”

The effects of one versus two episodically oriented practice narratives on children's reports of a repeated event

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