Recollection improves with age: children’s and adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences

ABSTRACT

Since the time of Freud, psychologists have drawn conclusions about children’s memory on the basis of retrospective research with adults. Here, we turn the tables by examining what prospective studies with children and adolescents can tell us about the retrospective memory accounts provided by adults. Adults were interviewed about recent events and events from different points during their childhood (Age 5, Age 10) and early adolescence (Age 13). Children (5- and 8- to 9-year-olds) and young adolescents (12- to 13-year-olds) were interviewed about recent events. When matched for age at the time of encoding, adults recalled more about the target events than did 5-year-olds, even though the retention interval for adults was substantially longer. We conclude that retrospective studies with adults may lead researchers to overestimate the content of the early childhood memories that survive. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for an understanding of memory development and the practical implications for the interpretation of adults’ retrospective accounts in the courtroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• adults
• childhood amnesia
• autobiographical memory
• memory development

Acknowledgements

We thank Julien Gross, Fiona Jack, Debbie McLachlan, Nicola Davis, Jenny Richmond, and Michelle Tustin for their help with data collection, interview transcription, inter-observer reliability, and data analysis. Special thanks to all of the families who participated in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All the children and adolescents were of European descent (one child also indicated Māori ethnicity) and all were native English speakers. This information was not collected for this sub-sample of adults, however, the socioeconomic profile of this area of New Zealand is relatively flat; all of the participants would have been classified as middle to upper-middle class.

2. Note that the children were also interviewed about more distant self- and parent-nominated events but those data are not reported here.

3. A series of paired t-tests were conducted to determine whether there were any differences in the total amount of information reported about self- and parent-nominated events at each target age by each group of participants. There were no differences in the amount of information reported about self- and parent-nominated events for the recent target age for any age group, largest t(11) = −1.17, p = .27. The adults reported the same amount of information for self- and parent-nominated events for target ages 5 and 13 years, largest t(10) = −2.19, p = .053, but reported more information about parent-nominated events at target age 10 (M = 36.30, SD = 10.28) than they did about self-nominated events at target age 10 (M = 26.10, SD = 10.08), t(9) = −3.05, p = .01, d = 1.06 (95% CI [−5.29, 3.18]).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi.