What it Means to Remember: Children's Reports of Their Earliest Memories

Abstract

Although a great deal of research has focused on adults' earliest memories (see Pillemer & White, 1989 for a review), limited research has examined children's earliest memories (see Wang, 2004; Peterson, Grant, & Boland, 2005). The purpose of the current investigation is to contribute to this limited body of research and to our understanding of age-related change in earliest memory recall across the childhood years by examining the earliest memories of children in three age groups: pre-kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. In addition, this research adds to the extant literature by scaffolding children's understanding of what it means to remember an event. Assessing participants' ability to apply their understanding of the mental state term, remember, to scenarios about a fictional character, the present study revealed that by third grade, children have at least a nascent appreciation of the distinction between being able to remember an event and merely knowing about it. With regard to participants' earliest memories, there were no age-related differences in age at earliest memory using child estimates of age. In contrast, parental estimates of age at earliest memory revealed an age-related difference, with third grade children recalling events that occurred earliest in time and children in pre-kindergarten recalling the most recently-occurring events. In addition, whereas participants in the two youngest age groups recalled more positively valenced memories, third graders recalled both positive and negative events with equal frequency. Together the results of this investigation suggest that younger participants' recall of more recent events, based on parental age estimates, may reflect their more limited understanding of what it means to remember. By third grade, however, children's more well-developed understanding may permit a more meaningful search of their autobiographical past to identify their earliest memories.