Mother-Child Reminiscing and Deliberate Memory: A Consideration of Metamemory Talk

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Children’s spontaneous use of deliberate strategies for remembering and the effectiveness of these techniques improve across the elementary school years (Ornstein et al., 2008). Additionally, a sizable literature points to the socialization of children’s autobiographical memory skills such that parents’ elaborative conversational style during mother-child reminiscing is associated with children’s autobiographical memory (Fivush et al., 2006). However, further investigation is required to understand how parents’ elaborative style may also be associated with the development of children’s deliberate memory skills and the use of mnemonic strategies. In addition to parents’ use of elaborations, research has pointed to the relevance of mothers’ metamemory talk, or references to the process of remembering (Coffman et al., 2011) in scaffolding children’s strategy use.
In an ongoing longitudinal study, we assessed parent-child reminiscing as it relates to children's memory and cognitive skills. A total of 82 children entering kindergarten (average age = 5.63 years; 46.3% female) were assessed with a battery of cognitive and academic achievement measures. In a Parent-Child Reminiscing task (Reese et al., 1993), dyads discussed jointly-experienced events. Children’s autobiographical memory was measured in new child contributions about the event. Using a median split, parents were categorized as higher or lower in a composite measure (adapted from Langley et al., 2017) that included standardized indexes of both elaborative and metamemory language. Children took part in a Free-Recall with Organizational Training (FRT) Task (Moely et al., 1992) to assess deliberate recall and strategic sorting. Children first completed a baseline trial using 16 individual line-drawings from 4 conceptual categories; children then completed a training trial, in which they were taught to sort the 16 drawings by category. Then, on a final generalization trial they were given a new set of stimuli, and their recall (items recalled) and strategic efforts (Adjusted Ratio of Clustering (ARC) scores, which range from -1[below chance sorting], to 0 [chance], to 1 [perfect categorical sort]) were again assessed.
Preliminary results highlight the association between parents’ elaborative reminiscing style and children’s performance on the FRT Task. Specifically, results suggest that parents’ elaborative reminiscing style was not associated with children’s spontaneous (baseline) strategy use or recall, but it was related with their ability to take advantage of training and use the organizational strategy during the generalization trial (F=4.64, p=.03). For children of high-elaborative parents, their average organizational sorting ARC scores increased from below chance at baseline (X ̅= -.21) to above chance at generalization (X ̅= .12), whereas children of low-elaborative parents remained below chance (X ̅= -.10). A similar pattern was found in recall performance (F=6.32, p=.01), such that children of high-elaborative parents increased in average recall from baseline (X ̅= 7.68) to generalization (X ̅= 8.03), highlighting their ability to apply sorting strategies in the service of a memory goal. These findings point to the relevance of metamemory talk when understanding parents’ roles in the socialization of cognition, and extend our conceptualization of elaborative style. These and other results will be presented to further highlight the role of parental socialization in deliberate strategy use and recall.

Authors

• Olivia K. Cook, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Miranda L. Denham, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• KellyAnn Bonanno, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Abigail Ward Jarvis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Keadija C. Wiley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter A Ornstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer L Coffman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author