Parental reminiscing style and children’s suggestibility about an alleged transgression

Mother-child memory conversation and children's independent memory: the roles of maternal characteristics

Mother-child memory conversations are a nuanced and important factor in children's memory development. The current study focuses on maternal characteristics that are related to individual differences in maternal elaborative style. It also examines the role of maternal elaborative style in children's elaborativeness in the context of reminiscing and recounting. Two hundred and nine Turkish mothers (Mage = 36.32, SD = 4.99) and their 5- to 6-year-olds (Mage in months = 66.88, SD = 4.04) (110 girls, 99 boys) participated in the current study. Results revealed that maternal individuation and balanced self-construal type predicted maternal elaborativeness, which in turn predicted child elaborativeness in reminiscing and recounting. Yet, such a relation was not observed for maternal attachment styles or sensitivity. Findings suggested the importance of maternal individuation and balanced self-construal for mothers' and children's elaborativeness in memory conversations.

Mnemicity: A Cognitive Gadget?

Episodic representations can be entertained either as "remembered" or "imagined"-as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the mnemicity of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution should be distinguished from other metacognitive operations (such as reality monitoring) and propose that this attribution is a "cognitive gadget"-a distinctively human ability made possible by cultural learning. Cultural learning is a type of social learning in which traits are inherited through social interaction. In the case of mnemicity, one culturally learns to discriminate metacognitive "feelings of remembering" from other perceptual, emotional, action-related, and metacognitive feelings; to interpret feelings of remembering as indicators of memory rather than imagination; and to broadcast the interpreted feelings in culture- and context-specific ways, such as "I was there" or "I witnessed it myself." We review evidence from the literature on memory development and scaffolding, metacognitive learning and teaching, as well as cross-cultural psychology in support of this view before pointing out various open questions about the nature and development of mnemicity highlighted by our account.

The influence of parent conversation goal and structure on children's event reports

Parents vary in conversational goals and style when discussing events with their children-two aspects of parent socialization that may be related, or exert opposing influence on the development of young children's report accuracy (a critical factor in children's eyewitness reports). In a sample of 116 parent-child dyads (M age = 53.17 months, range: 36-72 months), we examined the roles of parent social conversation goals (parent-reported and experimentally manipulated) and parent cognitive elaboration in children's ability to accurately report about a laboratory event. Parent cognitive elaboration varied by conversation goal and was positively associated with child accuracy across age but only when parents strongly endorsed social conversation goals. Parent questioning strategies and children's response accuracy varied with age. This work has implications for how we understand short- and long-term impacts caregivers exert on children's event reporting and suggests that even very young children are sensitive to variations in parent questioning practices.

Individual Differences in Children's Suggestibility: An Updated Review

The present review is intended as an overview of our current understanding of how children's individual characteristics, in terms of demographic, cognitive, and psycho-social variables, may influence their susceptibility to suggestion. The goals are to revisit conceptual models of the mechanisms of suggestibility, to provide an updated practical guide for practitioners, and to make recommendations for future research. Results suggest that children with intellectual impairment and those with nascent language skills may be particularly vulnerable to suggestion. Further, memory for separate events, theory of mind, executive function, temperament, and social competence may not be related to suggestibility, whereas additional work is needed to clarify the potential contributions of knowledge, stress, mental health, parental elaborative style, and adverse experiences/maltreatment to children's suggestibility.