Within the memory literature, a robust finding is of childhood amnesia: a relative paucity among adults for autobiographical or personal memories from the first 3 to 4 years of life, and from the first 7 years, a smaller number of memories than would be expected based on normal forgetting. Childhood amnesia is observed in spite of strong evidence that during the period eventually obscured by the amnesia, children construct and preserve autobiographical memories. Why early memories seemingly are lost to recollection is an unanswered question. In the present research, we examined the issue by using the cue word technique to chart the distributions of autobiographical memories in samples of children ages 7 to 11 years and samples of young and middle-aged adults. Among adults, the distributions were best fit by the power function, whereas among children, the exponential function provided a better fit to the distributions of memories. The findings suggest that a major source of childhood amnesia is a constant rate of forgetting in childhood, seemingly resulting from failed consolidation, the outcome of which is a smaller pool of memories available for later retrieval.

Episodic memory is defined as the ability to recall specific past events located in a particular time and place. Over the preschool and into the school years, there are clear developmental changes in memory for when events took place. In contrast, little is known about developmental changes in memory for where events were experienced. In the present research we tested 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children’s memories for specific laboratory events, each of which was experienced in a unique location. We also tested the children memories for the conjunction of the events and their locations. Age-related differences were observed in all three types of memory (event, location, conjunction of event and location), with the most pronounced differences in memory for conjunctions of events and their locations. The results have implications for our understanding of the development of episodic memory, including suggestions of protracted development of the ability to contextualize events in their spatial locations.

The present research was an examination of the onset of childhood amnesia and how it relates to maternal narrative style, an important determinant of autobiographical memory development. Children and their mothers discussed unique events when the children were 3 years of age. Different subgroups of children were tested for recall of the events at ages 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. At the later session, they were interviewed by an experimenter about the events discussed 2 to 6 years previously with their mothers (early-life events). Children ages 5, 6, and 7 remembered 60% or more of the early-life events. In contrast, children ages 8 and 9 years remembered fewer than 40% of the early-life events. Overall maternal narrative style predicted children's contributions to mother-child conversations at age 3 years; it did not have cross-lagged relations to memory for early-life events at ages 5 to 9 years. Maternal deflections of the conversational turn to the child predicted the amount of information children later reported about the early-life events. The findings have implications for our understanding of the onset of childhood amnesia and the achievement of an adult-like distribution of memories in the school years. They highlight the importance of forgetting processes in explanations of the amnesia.

The authors investigated the individual and relative contributions of different aspects of maternal support (i.e., verbal, affective, and behavioral) in relation to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing. Four-year-old children discussed personal past experiences with their mothers and with a researcher. In collaborative recall with their mothers, children's narrative behavior was regulated best by maternal use of specific elaborative components, such as affirmations. In contrast, in children's independent recall, affective and behavioral qualities of maternal support were related to children's memory performance. Specifically, during free-recall, the dimensions of quality of instruction and respect for autonomy were significant predictors of children's narratives. In the context of prompted recall (supported by wh-questions), respect for autonomy was the only significant predictor of children's involvement in the conversations and of the amount of unique content they provided. The findings suggest that different aspects of maternal behavior facilitate different components of children's reminiscing skills, which children might apply depending on demands of the autobiographical memory conversation.

Children build up knowledge about the world and also remember individual episodes. How individual episodes during which children learn new things become integrated with one another to form general knowledge is only beginning to be explored. Integration between separate episodes is called on in educational contexts and in everyday life as a major means of extending knowledge and organizing information. Bauer and San Souci (2010) provided an initial demonstration that 6-year-olds extend their knowledge by integrating between separate but related episodes; the episodes shared a high level of surface similarity. Experiments 1A and 1B of the current research were tests of integration under low and high levels of surface similarity, respectively. In Experiment 1A, when surface similarity of the episodes was low, 6-year-olds integrated between passages of text, yet their performance was not as robust as observed previously. In Experiment 1B, when surface similarity of the episodes was high, a replication of Bauer and San Souci’s results was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested whether a “hint” to consult the information learned in the passages improved performance even when surface level similarity was low. The hint had a strong facilitating effect. Possible mechanisms of integration between separate yet related episodes are discussed.