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Children's ability to intentionally recall events lessens with temporal distance to the occurrence. However, little is known about the effects of retention time on memories that emerge spontaneously. We examined spontaneous and strategic retrieval in eighty-one 46-month-olds' memory of a lab event after 1 week (the 1-week Condition) versus 43 weeks (the 43-week Condition) in a between-subjects design, using well-established procedures (Krøjgaard et al., in Consciousness and Cognition 55(91): 105, 2017). While spontaneous recall showed no significant effect of retention, the children's strategic recall was negatively affected: even though the children overall still remembered the event, the children in the 43-week Condition showed reduced voluntary recall compared to the children in the 1-week Condition. To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess spontaneous recall after such a long retention interval. The findings add to existing evidence of two modes of retrieval in early childhood and are of both theoretical and forensic relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]