School is almost out for summer in many places around the world, and as any parent or teacher knows, asking young kids about how their school day was, or even what they did for the summer, can be a challenge. Many children struggle to freely describe their day to day experiences, perhaps saying nothing at all or something like “OK.” A new paper dives into this interesting phenomenon, using a more naturalistic experimental design to find that it can take some time for free recall to develop, requiring multiple cognitive skills that might not be reflected in other types of memory.
“Anyone who’s spent time with young kids knows how fascinating it is to watch them develop – they learn to navigate their schools, to name animals and objects, and to perform tasks like buttoning their shirt, all of which rely on memory,” says Susan Benear, a postdoc in Catherine Hartley’s lab at NYU who was the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. “But even in the face of this profound ability to learn and remember, little ones often struggle to describe events from the recent past as a coherent narrative. Why is that? That’s what this project sought to investigate.”
I spoke with Benear about the significance of the study and its findings, the importance of developmental cognitive neuroscience, and what’s next for this area of research.
CNS: How did you become personally interested in this research area?
Benear: I spent my first year after finishing my undergraduate degree working as a teacher with Teach for America. Working with kids from diverse backgrounds in different grade levels led me to wonder how children’s ability to learn and remember the world around them changes as they age. Examining something from a developmental perspective also allows for extrapolation to how things function in a mature system. Learning about how kids think is interesting on its own, but it can also teach us about fundamentals of adult cognition.
CNS: How has free recall typically been studied in the past?
Benear: A lot of the ways we’ve studied memory in kids in the past was like a multiple-choice quiz. We might show them pictures of different objects one at a time, for example. Then at the end, we would show pictures of three different objects and ask, which one of these did you see in the list of pictures? Even young kids perform quite well on this kind of task. However, free recall is different. It asks you to describe what you experienced without any prompting. So instead of showing different pictures and asking for you to identify which ones you saw, we might say, can you name as many objects as you can remember from the list? This is a more challenging task even for adults, as anyone who’s ever taken a test with both multiple choice and free response questions knows!
Most free recall studies with children in the past have examined autobiographical memory, or events from children’s lives outside the lab, which allows for recall of complex experiences, but isn’t possible to verify in terms of accuracy. We wanted to find a sweet spot between realistic complexity and a controlled laboratory experiment and thus asked children to watch and recall a cartoon TV episode.
CNS: Tell us more about why you selected a TV episode.
Benear: We often ask children things like, what did you do at school today? We wanted to examine the ability to answer that kind of unprompted, free response question in preschool and early elementary school aged children. Because we also collected multiple-choice memory for the same TV show, as well as a measure of verbal skills, we were able to investigate what might be driving any age-related differences in free recall that we observed.
CNS: What were you most excited to find?
Benear: What was totally fascinating to us is just how little the youngest children in our sample said in the free recall portion! Even children as young as four years old did well on the multiple-choice questions, where we asked things like which character helped solve the mystery or which scene happened first. But those same children often said nothing at all when asked to freely recall what they remembered! Around age five-and-a-half is when we started to see improvement, but no children were able to recall as much as the least-descriptive adults from our sample until about age seven. It was really compelling to observe strong performance on the prompted tasks despite very poor performance on free recall in young children (ages 4-5), suggesting that kids did remember things from the TV show, they just struggled to form a cohesive narrative about what they remembered without any prompting.
CNS: What do you most want people to take away from this new work?
Benear: Sometimes when it seems like young children don’t remember something you ask them about, it may be more of an issue of cognitive search and verbal fluency than memory per se. Giving children a prompt like, ‘what friends did you play with today?’, or, ‘what did you have at snack time?,’ can help scaffold their memory search and may actually yield a better response than a more open-ended question, like, ‘what did you do today?’ Our findings emphasize the importance of vocabulary development and reading to children by teachers and caretakers – and children reading books themselves as they get older – for memory recall ability, as a stronger understanding of language and storytelling allows children to better weave narratives about the events of their own lives.
CNS: What does this work mean for cognitive neuroscientists?
Benear: For cognitive neuroscientists, especially those interested in development, this research points to the ever-present importance of ensuring construct validity and accounting for confounds. Had we only collected the free recall measure, we might have concluded that young children have an impoverished memory for complex recent experiences. However, examining their prompted memory performance and verbal ability allowed us to investigate alternative explanations that were more nuanced and ultimately more informative as to both children’s memory development and the implications for understanding mnemonic cognition in adults.
CNS: What’s next for this line of work?
Benear: I’d like to expand the age range beyond 7 years old to see at what age children reach adult-like performance on free recall tasks, and would also like to construct scaffolded levels of prompting that are intermediate between multiple-choice and free recall (e.g., ‘do you remember what the king tossed out to his subjects at the end of the show?’). I’m curious how the children from our sample would have done on these kinds of intermediately scaffolded questions. It would also be interesting to use functional neuroimaging to examine what brain regions are driving this improvement in recall ability with age. Getting children to speak at length in the MRI machine while remaining still would be an exciting challenge!
CNS: Is there anything else I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to add?
Benear: Kids are so fun to work with! I learn as much from the anecdotal experience of working with child participants and observing their behavior as I do from my quantitative data. It’s truly fascinating to see robust individual differences in temperament, personality, and cognition in children as young as four years old. These kids are already individual little people, and their frequent lack of social filter makes them a delight to interact with.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
