COLUMBUS – Does it seem like your children forget something you’ve told them almost as soon as you turn your back? Researchers at Ohio State say they probably do, but give them a few days. It will come back to them.
Unlike adults, small children can remember a piece of information better days later than they can on the day they first learned it, according to authors Vladimir Sloutsky, OSU professor of psychology and director of its Cognitive Development Lab and Kevin Darby, a doctoral student in psychology.
Their study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is the first to simultaneously document the cognitive phenomena of “extreme forgetting,” when kids learn two similar things in rapid succession, and the second thing causes them to forget the first, and “delayed remembering,” when they recall the forgotten information days later.
“An implication is that kids can be smarter than we necessarily thought they could be. They can make complex associations, they just need more time to do it,” said Darby.
When it comes to complicated things like rules, schedules or arrangements, Sloutsky and Darby say kids may have difficulty remembering them in the moment but, given a few days to absorb the new information, they can remember it later.
Part of their study was to ask children of four or five years old memorize pairings of pictures and take a test on how well they remembered them. They struggled to remember the second set of pictures, but those who had a two-day break before being retested remembered much more of what they had learned at the beginning of the second test than those who did not get a break.
“The takeaway message is that kids can experience extreme forgetting, and the counter-intuitive way to fight it is to let time pass,” Sloutsky said. “We’ve shown that it’s possible for children’s memories to improve with time, but it’s not like we uncovered a method for super-charging how much they can remember.”
Sloutsky and Darby say they believe their findings will help lead to a greater understanding of memory and how the human brain encodes new information into memory.