Abstract
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.
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Notes
In Krøjgaard et al. (2017), seven dimensions were used, but in the present study we decided to omit the ‘object’ dimension because we encountered problems in identifying unambiguous criteria by which the object dimension could be coded during coder training.
Given that we failed to obtain CDI data from one participant, these analyses were based on n = 123.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our student assistants for their indispensable help getting this study done. More specifically, we would like to thank Amalie Juul Harregaard, Anne Rytter Christensen, Louise Jensen, and Sarah Jakobsen for testing the participants. Yibin Zhang for preparing the data for later coding, Caroline Beyer and Mette Sørensen for coding the data and finally Emilie Kristensen for preparing data for later analysis. Most importantly, we would like to thank all of the participating children as well as their parents for bringing them to our lab and for adhering to our comprehensive instructions in this design. This study has been supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF89) and the VELUX FOUNDATION (VELUX10386).
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Sonne, T., Kingo, O.S., Berntsen, D. et al. Noting a difference: change in social context prompts spontaneous recall in 46-month-olds, but not in 35-month-olds. Psychological Research 85, 939–950 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01310-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01310-7