The Development of Children’s Autobiographical and Deliberate Memory Through Mother–Child Reminiscing

ABSTRACT

Children’s use of appropriate techniques for remembering and the effectiveness of deliberate strategies improve throughout elementary school. However, relatively little is known about the contextual factors that may play a role in the development of these skills as children enter formal school. Building upon findings from the mother – child reminiscing literature, the current study was designed to examine concurrent and longitudinal associations between maternal elaborative reminiscing style, children’s autobiographical memory, and children's deliberate memory skills. Fifty-one children entering kindergarten, drawn from three schools in the Southeastern region of the United States, were assessed with a battery that included tasks for measuring autobiographical memory and deliberate memory. In a parent – child reminiscing task , parent – child dyads discussed two jointly-experienced events, and parents were categorized as higher or lower in their elaborative reminiscing style. The results reveal an association between parents’ reminiscing style and their children’s performance on the Free Recall with Organizational Training Task , in which both spontaneous and trained strategy use and recall are measured. Although elaborative reminiscing style was not associated with children’s spontaneous strategy use or recall performance at school entry, children with higher elaborative mothers displayed higher levels of strategy use and recall scores after training than did children with lower elaborative mothers. These findings highlight linkages between parents’ elaborative style and children’s uptake and successful use of strategic organizational training, underscoring the role that parent – child reminiscing conversations play in the socialization of cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• Autobiographical Memory
• Deliberate Memory
• Parent–Child Interactio

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the families and teachers who participated in the Classroom Memory Study and the team of research assistants who helped to collect and process these data. The research reported here represents a portion of Olivia K. Cook’s master’s thesis, carried out under the direction of Jennifer L. Coffman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, OKC, upon reasonable request.

Notes

¹ Negative values were set at a chance level of 0, but the original ARCs scores, as described by Roenker, Thompson, and Brown (1971), were also calculated. Although the findings obtained with these two methods of calculation were comparable, for ease of interpretation, the approach used by Kron-Sperl, Schneider, and Hasselhorn (2008) was used here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A170637 to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.