Influence of parental reminiscing on spontaneous and voluntary memories in toddlerhood

While toddlers are often not able to voluntarily recall their previous experiences, they frequently show spontaneous memory retrieval: episodes that come to mind without any deliberate attempts to recall them. Our primary aim here was to capitalize on the dissociation between spontaneous and voluntary retrieval – respectively driven by associative and controlled mechanisms – to document the processes whereby parental reminiscing influences children’s memory for past events during the transition from toddlerhood to early childhood (age range: 24–46 months). To do so, parent-child dyads were recruited to participate in two experiments (n = 62 and 74, respectively). In both experiments, a new paradigm was created to assess spontaneous and voluntary memories of a previously experienced event, and the effect of parental reminiscing was assessed. In line with previous studies, results of both experiments revealed that children communicated more about the past event in the spontaneous than in the voluntary condition. Regarding the effect of parental reminiscing, the results of our item-by-item binomial generalized mixed-effect models revealed a relation between parental level of elaboration and children’s memory richness in both spontaneous and voluntary conditions, but a relation with the frequency of children’s memory recall only after a spontaneous retrieval. Given that the primary distinction between spontaneous and voluntary retrieval lies in the degree of strategic control required to access memories, this finding suggests that the impact of parental elaboration on children's memory operates mainly by supporting the development of associative processes, at least in the early preschool years.