Mental State Talk and Maternal Reminiscing: Investigating Parent-Child Interactions in Children's Source Monitoring

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Source monitoring is a cognitive process that involves identifying and analyzing the sources of information (Johnson et al., 1993). Yet children are typically at risk for making source errors, which has serious academic, legal, and social implications. Research has explored the various cognitive aspects of children's source-monitoring skills with little attention paid to potential social mechanisms. Parents are often the predominant linguistic partner of children and play a key role in how children remember past events (Valentino et al., 2014). Parental reminiscing styles impact children’s development in retrieving episodic memories. Given the relations between source monitoring and mental-state understanding (Earhart & Roberts, 2014), we explored how parents use mental-state talk with their children when discussing the temporal and unique aspects of individual events. As such, the purpose of the current study was to use a parenting-styles lens to study children’s source-monitoring development by investigating the role of mental-state talk during parent-child interactions. Based on past literature, we hypothesize a relationship between mental-state talk use and children’s source monitoring.
Children aged 3-6 years and their mothers were recruited to participate in two virtual sessions. At the first session, the mother-child dyads engaged in joint reminiscing about past events and read a wordless storybook together. Children’s receptive vocabulary (PPVT-4) and false-belief understanding were also assessed. For the source-monitoring measure, the dyads collaboratively constructed a farm scene by taking turns moving pieces. At the second visit, the researcher asked the child recognition and source questions about the farm activity from the first visit. Executive functioning skills were assessed using the working memory digit span test and the day/night task. Mothers completed demographic information and a measure of their child’s executive functioning in an online survey.
Data collection is complete, and the virtual sessions have been transcribed. The transcripts are currently being coded for the frequency of maternal and child mental-state talk across the joint reminiscing and the wordless storybook tasks. The cognitive assessments will be scored and coded (coding for these is straightforward) to be used in analysis. To analyze the data, I plan to conduct a series of regression analyses to explore the relationship between mental-state talk and source-monitoring skills. I also plan to run regression analyses to examine relationships between mental-state talk, theory of mind, and executive functioning, controlling for receptive language and child age. With a team of research assistants and access to necessary software while working from home, it will be feasible to have the analyses described here completed well in advance of the meeting.
This study will complement the established literature on cognitive processes in source monitoring with knowledge about the everyday social mechanisms at play, such as the role of parents and joint reminiscing. As such, findings will be used to help develop better parenting and educational practices regarding how children process different sources of information.

Authors

• Holly Autumn Nelson, Wilfrid Laurier University
  Presenting Author

• Kim Roberts, Wilfrid Laurier University
  Non-Presenting Author