Two-and-a-Half-Year-Olds’ Memory for Sources of Actions: Contextual Support Facilitates Recall

Young Children's Memories for Social Actions: Influences of Age, Theory of Mind, and Motor Complexity

Children learn actions performed by a social partner better when they misremember these actions as their own. Identifying the factors that alter the propensity to make appropriation errors is critical for optimizing social learning. In two experiments (N = 110), we investigate the developmental trajectory of appropriation errors and examine social-cognitive and motor-related factors in 3- to 8-year-olds. Children with better theory of mind (ToM) skills made fewer appropriation errors for motorically complex actions. Appropriation errors did not differ as a function of ToM if children could perform the corresponding actions. A second experiment replicated this effect and found no influence of collaborative context on appropriation errors. This research sheds light on the complex relations among development, social-cognition, and motor-related factors.

The role of goals and outcomes in young children's memory for actions

Four- to six-year-old children participated in three experiments designed to investigate action features that may contribute to the self-enactment effect and help clarify contradictory findings in the literature. Although activity is important in young children's learning and development, preschoolers' memory for self-actions is often found to be no better than memory for another person's actions. In the few studies in which the self-enactment effect has been found for this age group, the actions included as test materials differ markedly from those in the studies in which no differences occur. Specifically, the actions in studies finding the effect are goal-directed and enable outcomes whereas the actions in studies that don't find the effect have no instrumental goals, other than to perform the action, and often do not enable outcomes external to the action carried out. In Experiment 1 source memory and in Experiment 2 free recall were better for children's own actions than those of the experimenter when children participated in actions that produced outcomes in a game-like context. Findings from these two studies suggested that action outcomes were particularly important in these self-enactment effects which were then verified in Experiment 3. Our results support the role of self-directed actions for learning in early childhood classrooms, but highlight the contribution of goal-based activities that lead to instrumental and enabling outcomes in that learning.

Children Can Learn New Facts Equally Well From Interactive Media Versus Face to Face Instruction

Today's children have more opportunities than ever before to learn from interactive technology, yet experimental research assessing the efficacy of children's learning from interactive media in comparison to traditional learning approaches is still quite scarce. Moreover, little work has examined the efficacy of using touch-screen devices for research purposes. The current study compared children's rate of learning factual information about animals during a face-to-face instruction from an adult female researcher versus an analogous instruction from an interactive device. Eighty-six children ages 4 through 8 years (64% male) completed the learning task in either the Face-to-Face condition (n = 43) or the Interactive Media condition (n = 43). In the Learning Phase of the experiment, which was presented as a game, children were taught novel facts about animals without being told that their memory of the facts would be tested. The facts were taught to the children either by an adult female researcher (Face-to-Face condition) or from a pre-recorded female voice represented by a cartoon Llama (Interactive Media condition). In the Testing Phase of the experiment that immediately followed, children's memory for the taught facts was tested using a 4-option forced-choice paradigm. Children's rate of learning was significantly above chance in both conditions and a comparison of the rates of learning across the two conditions revealed no significant differences. Learning significantly improved from age 4 to age 8, however, even the preschool-aged children performed significantly above chance, and their performance did not differ between conditions. These results suggest that, interactive media can be equally as effective as one-on-one instruction, at least under certain conditions. Moreover, these results offer support for the validity of using interactive technology to collect data for research purposes. We discuss the implications of these results for children's learning from interactive media, parental attitudes about interactive technology, and research methods.

Two rooms, two representations? Episodic-like memory in toddlers and preschoolers

Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, we tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters; each room contained two identical sets of four containers, but arranged differently. A distinct toy was hidden in a distinct container in each room. In Experiment 1, which involved children between 15 and 26 months who were prompted with a very explicit cue (a part of the hidden toy), we found a marked shift in performance with age: while 15- to 20-month-olds concentrated their searches on the two containers that sometimes contained toys, they did not distinguish between them according to context, but 21-26-month-olds did. However, surprisingly, without toy cues, even the youngest children showed a fragile ability to disambiguate the two containers by room context. In Experiment 2, we tested 34- to 40-month-olds and 64- to 72-month-olds without toy cues. The 5-year-olds were nearly perfect, and the 3-year-olds showed a significant preference for the correct container given only the context. In Experiment 3, we filled in the age range, and also investigated the effects of the use of labels (i.e. names of experimenters and rooms) and of familiarization time, in groups of 34- to 40-month-olds, 42- to 48-month-olds, and 50- to 56-month-olds. Neither labels nor familiarization time had an effect. Across experiments, there was regular age-related improvement in context-based memory. Overall, the results suggest that children's episodic memory may undergo an early qualitative change, yet to be precisely characterized, and that continuing increments in the use of contextual cues occur throughout the preschool period. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkwEFw0UEz4&list=PLwxXcOKHPC0llAPVcJyW4EtzlA934A2Rz&index=1.