Early Positive Parenting and Maternal Depression History Predict Children's Relational Binding Ability at School-Age

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to impact aspects of memory related to relational binding and also the hippocampus, a structure critical to binding. The present study investigated the influences of early and concurrent parenting and maternal lifetime depression history on children's ability to successfully bind details and retain this information across a delay. A total of 97 children are included in this report. Children were part of a longitudinal study with testing at preschool age (Time 1: 3-5 years) and school age (Time 2: approximately 3 years later). At both time points, positive and negative parenting behaviors were assessed during observational parenting tasks and maternal depression history was assessed with a clinical interview. At Time 2, a composite binding score was derived from two episodic memory tasks: a source memory task and a feature binding task. Findings indicated that early positive parenting predicted higher binding scores later in childhood whereas maternal depression was associated with lower scores. These results were robust even after taking into account child age, general cognitive ability, race, and parental education. These findings highlight 2 factors related to the caregiving environment, parenting and maternal depression, that contribute to individual differences in children's relational binding ability and underscore the importance of early experience on episodic memory development.