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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]

Recent evidence shows that returning to the same distinct lab setting after 1 week triggers spontaneous memories in 35- and 46-month-old children. However, it remains unclarified which specific cues are triggering spontaneous recall. We report two experiments in which distinct contextual cues were altered between encoding and test. In Experiment 1 (N = 76), the color of the box containing the event props was changed. Despite this change, the children still showed spontaneous recall. In Experiment 2 (N = 77), a more radical change was employed as the children returned to a completely differently furnished, and novel room. The children still engaged in spontaneous recall, although less frequently. Importantly, when comparing the number of children having spontaneous recollections, only about half as many children in Experiment 2 as in Experiment 1 exhibited spontaneous memories. These results underscore the importance of an encoding-retrieval match for spontaneous episodic memory in young children. [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]

An experimental paradigm has shown that it is possible to activate spontaneous memories in children by having them re-visit the setting in which they were introduced to a memorable event. Nevertheless, the most important cues for spontaneous recall remain undetermined. In response, we investigated the importance of the experimenter by introducing 35-month-olds (n = 62) and 46-month-olds (n = 62) to the same or a new person after one week. We expected that altering the experimenter would result in fewer recollections through reducing the overlap of cues between encoding and testing. In contrast, the manipulation affected the two age groups differently: no effect of condition was seen in the 35-month-olds, whereas the 46-month-olds performed better, when the experimenter had changed, suggesting a sensitivity to change and an ability to update their knowledge of the event. We replicated previous findings demonstrating that both age groups exhibited spontaneous recollections. [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]

We examined three-year-olds' (N = 50) strategic recall of past events from their daily life that they recently had recalled spontaneously. Hence, in contrast to most research on memories of past events in young children, we had evidence that the events had been encoded and consolidated. Moreover, we examined whether the age of the to-be-remembered events as well as language skills would affect the strategic recall. The results showed that even though the children's answers were coded exceedingly 'liberal', the children were unable to provide strategic recall in 51% of the cases. Language skills affected their performance, whereas the age of the to-be-remembered events and time since last remembrance did not. These results highlight the cognitive constraints related to the deliberate search process required when responding to direct questions concerning past events and add to the understanding of retrieval mechanisms in young children, by underscoring the advantage of spontaneous recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Distinct, environmental cues trigger young children's spontaneous recall. • Young children typically look at a target cue preceding a spontaneous memory. • Direct, in-vivo examination may be used to examine spontaneous recall in children. Evidence supporting the assumption that spontaneous recall of previously experienced events is triggered by distinct, environmental cues has hitherto exclusively been based on post-hoc reasoning and not on direct, in vivo examination. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we present the first real-time analyses of 35-month-old's looking time as spontaneous retrieval unfolds. Twenty-nine middle-to-higher SES children (out of 114 participating) spontaneously recalled having taken part in either a Teddy or a Game event (adjacently placed in two unique boxes) when returning to the lab one week later. Naïve coders registered looking time towards the two dissimilar looking boxes 10 s preceding spontaneous recall. The children having spontaneous recollections looked reliably longer at their Target box (relative to Foil), whereas this was not the case for a group of matched (by gender, event, and CDI) controls producing no spontaneous memories. The findings are important for understanding how visual attention facilitates spontaneous recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]