Children's Reasoning About Which Episode of a Repeated Event is Best Remembered

Abstract

Despite much research into children's ability to report information from an individual episode of a repeated event, their capacity to identify well-remembered episodes is unknown. Children (n = 177) from Grades 1 to 3 participated in four episodes of a repeated event and were later asked to recall the time that they remembered ‘best’ and then ‘another time.’ Post-recall, children were asked what they believed ‘the time you remember best’ meant, and how they decided which episode to recall. Older children were better able than younger to understand the prompt and nominate an episode, but children of all ages showed improved ability to produce an episode for discussion when subsequently asked about ‘another time.’ All children struggled to describe their decision-making processes, suggesting that they had yet to develop sufficient metamemory knowledge for the task. Results suggest that children have difficulty explicitly identifying well-remembered episodes of repeated events.