Mother-child participation in conversation about the past: relationships to preschoolers' theory of mind.

Forty 3.5 to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their participation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic skill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was related to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct replies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the relevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. The results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiographical memory.

Young children's understanding of conflicting mental representation predicts suggestibility.

This study examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations (CMRs). Three- to 5-year-olds listened to a story accompanied by pictures. Following a 4-min delay, children answered straightforward and misleading questions about the story. One week later, their memory for the story was assessed. Children also completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about CMRs. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that suggestibility was negatively related to performance on CMR tasks. This finding remained significant after controlling for age, children's level of initial encoding of the event, and their ability to retrieve event details when not misled. An integration is proposed between children's theory of mind and source monitoring that may help to explain early developmental changes in suggestibility.

Attachment and emotion in autobiographical memory development.

The relation of attachment status to autobiographical memory was assessed in 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds. Of specific interest was the relation between attachment status and the emotional content of parent-child memory conversations. Forty-six mother-child dyads discussed four events designed to elicit positive and negative emotional themes. Both attachment status and gender moderated the emotional content of this memory talk. Mother-daughter dyads with insecurely attached girls engaged in relatively more negative memory talk than mother-daughter dyads with securely attached girls. However, the dyads of secure girls elaborated more often on both positive and negative emotional themes than did the dyads of insecure girls who primarily elaborated on positive themes. The relations between attachment status and emotion talk for mother-son dyads were inconsistent. Findings were discussed in terms of the role of attachment in the social construction of autobiographical memories.

Gender-schema development and children's constructive story memory: evidence for a developmental model.

The objectives of the present research were to (a) provide a developmental model based on script research for describing how changes in memory for gender-related information are related to changes in gender-role stereotypes, (b) examine developmental differences in the effect of stereotype manipulations on the construction of new memories, and (c) examine the relation between stereotyped activity preferences and memory for gender-related information. 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds listened to a story in which characters performed behaviors typical and atypical of gender-role stereotypes. An introduction preceded the story in which story characters' activities and preferences were described as either consistent or inconsistent with gender-role stereotypes. Dependent variables were the percentage of typical and atypical story items correctly recognized and the percentage of false alarms made for new items. Gender-role knowledge, stereotyped preferences, and gender-role flexibility were assessed. Results for false alarms, but not hit rates, supported the hypotheses of the model: (a) 6-year-olds falsely recognized typical distractors more than atypical distractors (this effect was nonsignificant for 4- and 8-year-olds), (b) false alarms for atypical distractors decreased between ages 4 and 6, and (c) false alarms for typical distractors decreased between ages 6 and 8. Contrary to expectation, stereotype manipulation effects did not interact with age, but were influenced by gender. Stereotyped preferences were strongly related to memory for gender-related information for both males and females. Results are discussed in terms of developmental and individual differences in gender-schema strength and composition.