Whether and how children remember what they have learned depends on their emotions: what they learned when feeling calm is impossible when they are light and vice versa. This was demonstrated in a study conducted by development psychologists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) with 96 children aged nine months. They published their report in the journal Child Development from 19. August 2020.
One minute happy, the next minute sad
The condition of infants is unpredictable: they can play happily at one time and completely uncomfortable in the next. “Surprisingly, it was still unclear whether these emotional changes affect learning and memory in children,” says Professor Sabine Seehagen, Head of the Development Psychology research group at RUB. Studies by adults have shown that emotion affects thinking. We remember the experience we had in a particular situation, especially when we were in the same mood again.
To determine if this condition, known as government-dependent memory, also exists in children, researchers studied 96 children as young as nine months old. In the first stage, the infants engaged in quiet activities with their parent, such as looking at picture books, or went wild for a jump; then, they watched the experimenter perform the actions with the handcuff, and thus learn how to do it. “The feature that impressed us was whether the children were able to replicate the observations a quarter of an hour later,” as Sabine Seehagen explains the experiment. Just before the test started, some children were put in the same situation and while they were studying, while others were placed in different situations by playing different games.
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Children who were in a different situation during learning than when remembering what they had learned would not be able to imitate actions and fakes: memory performance was twice as high if they were in the same situation during learning and remembering what they would learn. "This suggests that the depreciation of local conditions at this age may hinder access to the contents of the record," says Seehagen.
Researchers think that this may be due to the fact that adults cannot recall any of the experiences of their early childhood. And parents can understand why their children may remember certain things and may not remember others: some things that the child learned in a calm state can no longer be found when the child is angry. “In this study we looked at only one age group,” says Sabine Seehagen. "Further research will be needed to examine how the relationship between emotion and memory grows with increasing age."
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