To ask or not to ask: strategic recall, but not spontaneous recall, decreases by the passage of time in 46-month-olds' memory of a unique event.

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.

Distinct environmental cues trigger spontaneous recall of past events in 3- and 4-year-old children even after long delays.

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 ( η p 2 > . 088 ). These findings suggest that spontaneous retrieval facilitated by distinct environmental cues provides a short-cut to young children's event memories.

By-passing strategic retrieval: Experimentally induced spontaneous episodic memories in 35- and 46-month-old children.

Most parents have experienced their preschool child having spontaneous episodic memories, that is, verbally reported memories of past events that come to the child almost out of the blue. Until recently such memories had only been observed outside the lab. By means of a new paradigm we report experimentally induced spontaneous memories of a unique event experienced one week earlier in 35- and 46-month-old children (N=110). At the first visit, half of the children experienced a Teddy event and the other half experienced a Game event. At the second visit the children's spontaneous utterances were recorded while waiting. The results revealed that the children talked spontaneously about the unique event experienced previously. Age showed no systematic effect on spontaneous episodic recollection, but there was a clear effect of age on subsequent control questions requiring strategic retrieval. The results support the idea of involuntary episodic remembering being a developmentally early achievement.