"Family Stories" and Their Implications for Preschoolers' Memories of Personal Events

Most adults experience childhood amnesia: They have very few memories of events prior to 3 to 4 years of age. Nevertheless, some early memories are retained. Multiple factors likely are responsible for the survival of early childhood memories, including external representations such as videos, photographs, and conversations about past experiences, which help sustain memories over time. The present research was an experimental test of whether repeated recounting of past events influences young children's recall during a year delay. Twenty-four mothers and their 4-year-old children talked repeatedly about two randomly selected personal events that were assigned to become family-story events. Mothers were asked not to initiate conversations about two other randomly selected events (control events). A year later, children were interviewed by an experimenter about all four events. In free recall, children retrieved more of the family-story than the control events. With the aid of Wh-questions, levels of retrieval no longer differed. Moreover, the completeness and organization of children's narratives did not depend on whether they were about family-story or control events. The pattern of results suggests that repeated conversations about a past event help to maintain accessibility of the memory but may not substantially impact the integrity of the memory trace itself. The role of family stories in children's social and autobiographical memory development is discussed.