Young Children's Memory for the Times of Personal Past Events

Abstract

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month period. At test, children made relative recency judgments and estimated the time of each event using conventional time-scales (time of day, day of week, month of year, and season). Children also were asked to provide justifications for their time-scale judgments. Six- and 8-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, accurately judged the order of two distinct events. There were age-related improvements in children's estimation of the time of events using conventional time-scales. Older children provided more justifications for their time-scale judgments compared to younger children. Relations between correct responding on the time-scale judgments and provision of meaningful justifications suggest that children may use that information to reconstruct the times associated with past events. The findings can be used to chart a developmental trajectory of performance in temporal memory for personal past events, and have implications for our understanding of autobiographical memory development.

It’s all about location, location, location: Children’s memory for the “where” of personally experienced events

“…With more personally relevant or autobiographical events, we may expect to see smaller age-related differences in performance, relative to those observed in the present research. This outcome was observed in Pathman, Samson, Dugas, Cabeza, and Bauer (in press0, in which school-age children either took photographs of museum exhibits themselves (greater personal relevance) or viewed on a laptop computer photographs taken by another (lesser personal relevance). Children’s performance more closely approximated that of adults’ when they took the photographs themselves than when they viewed the photographs on a computer.…”

“…Participants completed several tasks during the sessions. The data from some of the tasks are published elsewhere (Larkina & Bauer, 2010, in press; Pathman et al, in press); all of the memory data presented here are unique to this manuscript. Four female experimenters administered the tasks; children were tested by the same experimenter at both sessions.…”

“…They figure prominently in theories of the organization of autobiographical memory, in particular (e.g., Conway, 1992), and there has been empirical work concerning adults’ (e.g., Curran & Friedman, 2003; St. Jacques, Rubin, LaBar, & Cabeza, 2008) and to a lesser extent, children’s (e.g., Friedman, 1996; Friedman, Reese, & Dai, 2010; Pathman, Larkina, Burch, & Bauer, in press), abilities to locate events in time. Indeed, the ability to subjectively “travel in time” has become almost defining of episodic memory (e.g., Tulving, 1998, 2005; Wheeler, 2000).…”

Development of episodic and autobiographical memory: The importance of remembering forgetting

“…In Bauer and Larkina (2014b), children 3 years of age at the time of events remembered in excess of 60% of them over delays of as many as 3 years. In this same age period, children become increasingly accurate and reliable in determining which of two events occurred earlier and in justifying their choices (Pathman, Larkina, Burch, & Bauer, 2013). They also gain command of the use of conventional indices of time, such as calendars (e.g., Friedman, Reese, & Dai, 2010) and seasons (Bauer, Burch, Scholin & Güler, 2007; Bauer & Larkina, 2014a), to locate when personally relevant event occurred.…”

Short- and Long-term Memory during Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures

“…For instance, children increasingly include specific references to time, such as 'on my birthday' or 'last summer' (Pathman et al, 2013). Markings such as these not only establish that an event happened at a time different from the present, but they begin to set up a timeline along which an organized historical record of when events occurred can be constructed.…”