Children’s memory for events: The challenge of free recall

Early childhood is a critical period for episodic memory development, with sharp behavioral improvements between ages 4 and 7 years. We asked children and adults to view a television episode, a naturalistic task for which there exists a ground truth, and assessed their event cognition, forced-choice recognition for event details, ability to temporally order scenes, and free recall. Children’s free recall performance improved dramatically with age, with many young children recalling nothing, even though recognition measures showed retention. However, detail in free recall was related to both recognition and temporal order forced-choice memory performance in our full sample, showing agreement among memory measures. For children, free recall was additionally related to verbal skills and more adult-like event segmentation. We propose that free recall has a more protracted developmental trajectory because it requires more substantial verbal skills and better understanding of event schemas than forced-choice memory tasks.