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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]

Verbally reported long‐term memory for past events typically improves with age. However, such findings are based exclusively on studies, where children are directly asked to recall. The present study showed that when 3‐ (n = 113, 59 girls) and 4‐year‐olds (n = 113, 62 girls), predominantly White, were brought back to a distinct laboratory‐setting after either 1‐, 4.5‐, or 13‐weeks, children—regardless of age and delay—spontaneously recalled the distinct event experienced at their first visit (all Cohen's ds > 1.00). Meanwhile, the oldest children outperformed the youngest when being asked directly to retrieve the event (ηp2>.088). These findings suggest that spontaneous retrieval facilitated by distinct environmental cues provides a short‐cut to young children's event memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is typically challenging for two-year-olds to recollect memories upon demand. However, we know from diary studies that children spontaneously, 'out of the blue', recall memories about their past. Spontaneous retrieval may be less cognitively demanding because it is less dependent on prefrontal cortex and mainly relies on associative processes. However, spontaneous retrieval remains to be examined experimentally in children younger than age 3. We examined spontaneous retrieval by means of both verbal and nonverbal measures in fifty-two 23-months-old children in a controlled lab-setting. When returning to a distinct lab setting after one week, more than 44 % of the children had spontaneous recollections of a unique one-off Magical Teddies Event. This finding demonstrates that spontaneous recall of past events is present very early in childhood, which has implications for the understanding of memory development in young children. • We induced spontaneous recollections in two-year-olds in an experimental setting. • Two-year-olds spontaneously recalled a unique one-off event after one week. • Spontaneous recall may be a less cognitively demanding mode of retrieval. • Spontaneous recall may be a developmental forerunner to strategic recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]