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How do children remember experiences?

Published: 26 May 2026

Articles Development Society Neuroscience Individual differences Psychology LEVANTE

Children’s memory growth is shaped by foundational cognitive abilities and the environment

Photo by PetrBonek from iStock.com

Authors

Zoe Ngo

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Pedro Espinosa-Villafranca

Predoctoral Candidate at the Emmy Noether Research Group RAVEN, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Partner

Learning Variability Network Exchange

The Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) seeks to understand how children grow, learn, and develop across different times, places, and contexts so that they can be supported to thrive in the multitude of experiences they will encounter throughout life. It brings together researchers from around the world to create the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary open dataset aiming to capture the richness and diversity of child development and learning. By including data collection of common measures on these different areas longitudinally and at a global level, LEVANTE will help researchers, educators, and policy-makers understand learning and developmental variability, thus improving future outcomes for diverse groups of children worldwide.

How do children remember the important things in their lives? In our research, we examine two different memory skills. First, we explore how well children retain detailed memories of specific episodes in their lives. Second, we look at how efficiently they build general knowledge about the world. These memory abilities rely on a set of psychological processes that support learning and retention of information over time.

Our research group is interested in understanding learning variability and memory variability across childhood. How do children of the same age differ in their memory capacities? And how do children differ in their development of various memory abilities from early to late childhood – especially as they transition from preschool into formal schooling?

To answer these questions, we use controlled lab-based memory assessments, test real-world memory abilities, and measure children’s brains. This design allows us to capture children’s memory development in terms of task performance, everyday behaviour, and brain mechanisms. We link these measures to changes in other aspects of learning variability in areas such as executive function, language, reasoning, and social cognition. We also explore how lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, and features in the home and school environments, such as safety and access to playgrounds, relate to children’s learning and memory outcomes.

“Memory always begins with experience.”

How we study memory development

Although our work is based primarily in Berlin, we have expanded into a longitudinal study – studying the same children over time – that includes Cape Coast in Ghana and Quibdó in Colombia. This is exciting because it allows us to examine children’s learning and memory development across diverse cultural and environmental contexts.

In Berlin, we are studying children’s memories with the help of wearable cameras that capture personal experiences. We then use the photos as cues to test children’s memories for these events months or years after they occurred. In addition, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how brain activation differs when children are shown remembered versus forgotten events. This approach helps us understand how everyday contexts shape cognitive development. It also opens the door to a more inclusive science of learning by enabling us to identify different environmental conditions that improve or worsen children’s outcomes.

In Cape Coast and Quibdó, we examine whether children’s everyday physical activities may protect or enhance cognitive development. We are interested in finding out how children’s level of physical activity and their surrounding environments, including their homes, neighbourhoods, and schools, together shape the pace of change in early learning and memory. By studying these questions across countries and in real-world settings outside the lab, we can better understand how children’s experiences and activity patterns influence cognition during the transition into school.

However, child research comes with many challenges. Our research requires a concerted effort by researchers, parents, children and tech support to follow a set protocol to collect data from wearable technology. This works opens up a whole new set of questions for the field. We are grateful to the many families who are eager to participate and help us collect high-quality data, and to the children who engage in our tasks and brighten our day.

How children will benefit from memory research

Our work characterizes children’s memory profiles. We are learning about the features that make a young child’s experiences memorable, as these features may be crucial for other types of learning We are also learning about memory’s role in the development of other cognitive and social abilities.

One long-term ambition is to inform education and health policy, school curricula, and neighborhood structures, to tailor education to individual needs, and improve parents’ understanding of children’s developing memory abilities. We hope to guide institutional policy aimed at minimizing risk factors, maximizing protective factors, and implementing interventions. Moreover, we hope our research will help improve diagnostic tools so that educators and parents can provide the best possible support for individual children, taking into account their needs and potential. In particular, we want to find strategies to support children in under-resourced communities.

What we have learnt about children’s memory development

In early childhood, children are more able to extract regularities across experiences than to remember specific events. They may remember that nap time follows lunch at preschool, but not who sat next to them at lunch yesterday. This may be because learning from regularities in the environment provides a useful foundation for storing specific, more detailed memories for long-term use. Educators can capitalize on children’s early strength in learning from regularities by teaching core concepts through repetition and numerous examples, and by providing additional support to help children remember specific details that are important.

“Memories of real-world experiences are shaped by personal meaning, emotion, a child’s own sense of agency, and social interaction.”

What we are learning next about memory

Laboratory studies have taught us a great deal about the development of foundational memory processes, such as the ability to remember what happened, where, and when, and to distinguish between similar experiences.

Memory always begins with experience. The carefully controlled ‘micro-experiences’ we create in the lab are very different from the events children encounter in their daily lives. Memories of real-world experiences are shaped by personal meaning, emotion, a child’s own sense of agency, and social interaction. These are central to what makes an event memorable in the first place.

We are excited to connect children’s performance on lab-based assessments with their memory abilities in everyday life. Important work has already been done on autobiographical memory, but we are working to find out how closely our lab-based measures of memory capacity map onto children’s memory in the real world. Answering that question is essential if we want to capture not only how memory works in principle, but also how it matters in children’s lives.