Memory detectives : how children make judgments on others’ memories and use them to navigate the social world.

Recent studies have examined the role of episodic memory for bonding with others. While previous research found that adults use interpersonal monitoring – i.e. the ability to judge the reliability of another person’s memories – to decide whether the information reported by others is trustworthy enough to be used later and to determine whether they are willing to interact with this person, this link has yet to be established in children. Here, the existence and the developmental path of these interpersonal monitoring processes in children, the variables that influence their development, and their contribution to children’s social learning will be examined. To this end, children between 4 and 8 years old will be recruited and asked to rate the reliability of different narratives varying in terms of episodic richness. Children’s willingness to interact with the narrator will be assessed through explicit social judgments, moral decision scenarios, and behavioral responses to a peer in distress while the impact of children’s memory, metacognitive, and mindreading skills on the development of children's interpersonal monitoring processes will be investigated. Finally, we will document the effect of the development of interpersonal monitoring processes on vicarious learning – i.e. learning from the experience of others. We hypothesize that (1) judgments about others’ memories are based on specific memory cues such as episodic richness and, thus, could mediate the relation between people’s memory richness and the social support they receive; (2) interpersonal monitoring skills improve with age due to the maturation of memory, metacognition, and mindreading; and (3) the results of the interpersonal monitoring operations increase the likelihood that the information conveyed by another person’s memories will be used later by children to solve similar problems. Overall, this research will provide new insights on the development of social memory and metacognition in children.