Young Children's Reports of When Events Occurred: Do Event Type and Assessment Method Matter?

Abstract

Studying young children's reporting about when various events occurred informs about the development of episodic memory and metacognition. In two experiments, 55 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children participated in two activity sessions, a week apart. During the activity sessions, they learned novel animal facts and body movements, and they coloured animal pictures and posed for body movement photos. Immediately after the second activity session, children were interviewed about when they experienced the various events. Overall, children were as accurate about learning events as physical events, but they were more accurate when asked temporal distance (e.g. ‘Which did you learn a longer time ago, “X” or “Y”?’) than temporal location questions (e.g. ‘Which did you learn before today, “X” or “Y”?’). The results suggest that young children's apparent difficulty recognizing new learning is not due to a rapid ‘remember‐to‐know shift’. Rather, the way we ask young children about when they experienced various events determines their accuracy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

That was last time! The effect of a delay on children's episodic memories of learning new facts

“…For example, Taylor et al () found that most 4‐year‐olds and even some 5‐year‐olds had difficulty reporting when they had learned the names of colours that they had just been taught by the experimenter. Recent research has also indicated that 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds have particular difficulty indicating when learning occurred when they are asked immediately and the questions are framed in terms of temporal location, where children are asked to indicate a specific time that learning occurred (Tang et al, ; Tang & Bartsch, ; Tang, Dickey, & Samuelsen, ). Even with this known difficulty in identifying when learning occurred, the present findings are still surprising, given that even when children's accuracy was determined by the mention of any accurate details, and thus, was not reliant just on their indicating a specific time where learning had occurred.…”