Preschoolers’ Memory Recall of New Information: Relation to Parental Reminiscing

The influence of parental reminiscing style (the way parents discuss past events with their children) on the development of children’s autobiographical memory has been well documented. The specific mechanisms involved in this effect, however, remain unknown. We explored the association between specific components of parental reminiscing and preschoolers’ episodic memory. Fifty-three parent–child dyads (MChild Age= 53.13 months, 29 females) from Belgium were tested twice within a delay of about nine months. At the first time point, parental reminiscing style was assessed via a parent–child discussion of a prior standardized event (a museum visit) focusing on both the structure of parental interactions and the addressed content. At each time point, children were administered with story–recall tasks in the form of true–false recognition about previously heard stories. Generalized linear mixed-effect models were conducted on an item-by-item basis. Results indicated that parental reminiscing is associated with preschoolers’ recognition memory performance at both time points, but not all reminiscing components equally influence children’s performance. Specifically, parents’ concretisations and metamemory talk were found to impact children’s memory. The identification of these components provided insights for exploring the processes underlying the reminiscing–memory influence (in-depth encoding of information, binding processes, and metacognition).