Flashback Episodes: Influence of parental consolidation on spontaneous memories in toddlerhood

While toddlers are often not able to explicitly recall their previous experiences, they frequently show spontaneous memory retrieval – i.e., episodes that come to mind without any deliberate attempts to recall them. To date, however, little is known about the early emergence of spontaneous memories and the factors that favor their occurrences in toddlerhood. The primary aim of this study was to document age-related differences in children’s spontaneous episodic memory retrieval during the transition from toddlerhood to early childhood while also examining whether memory consolidation (i.e., throughout parental reminiscing) could favor the occurrences of these memories. To test this, a new paradigm created to experimentally induced spontaneous retrieval of a previously experienced event in 28- (n=29) and 36-month-old children (n=28) was implemented. First, all children saw an event in which an accomplice hid a gift somewhere in a room. Half of the participants were then invited to reminisce about the event with their parent. One week later, half of the children were reintroduced into the same room and spontaneous verbal and non-verbal utterances about the event were recorded. The other half of the participants were introduced into another room and asked to voluntarily recall the event using free recall, cued-recall and recognition tasks. A mixed-effect model including age (28- vs. 36 months), the retrieval condition (spontaneous vs. voluntary), and the reminiscing condition (with vs. without) as fixed factors revealed that both 28- and 36-month-old children communicated more about the event in the spontaneous than in the voluntary condition. Memory consolidation throughout parental reminiscing, on the other hand, was only found to have a positive effect on children’s spontaneous retrieval. A main effect of age was also revealed, indicating that older children recalled more details about the past event than younger children, but no interactions were found between children’s age and the retrieval or the reminiscing condition. Overall, our findings provide new insights regarding the early development of spontaneous episodic memories during the transition from toddlerhood to early childhood.