title: The effect of verbal reminders on memory reactivation in 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children.
abstract: For adults, verbal reminders provide a powerful key to unlock our memories. For example, a simple question, such as "Do you remember your wedding day?" can reactivate rich memories of the past, allowing us to recall experiences that may have occurred days, weeks, and even decades earlier. The ability to use another person's language to access our memory of a prior experience is considered to be one of the hallmarks in human memory development, but surprisingly, little is known about the ontogeny of this fundamental ability. Prior research has shown that by 4 years of age, children can use a simple verbal reminder (e.g., "Do you remember coming here before?") to reactivate an otherwise inaccessible memory of a unique visual stimulus. Given that language comprehension precedes production, it has been hypothesized that the ability to use verbal reminders may emerge well before 4 years of age. In the present experiment, we tested this hypothesis by examining whether a verbal reminder reactivated memory in 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children who were tested using the visual-paired comparison (VPC) paradigm. Our findings showed that the ability to exploit a simple verbal reminder emerges by at least 2 years of age.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors: Kana
authors: K
authors: Imuta
authors: Damian
authors: D
authors: Scarf
authors: Harlene
authors: H
authors: Hayne
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013997:Time Factors; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*