Knowing in advance: Effective strategies for preparing young children for novel experiences

为了优化认知和情感发展，确定对儿童生活的影响至关重要。亲子间关于过去的对话是如何影响发展的，这一点已经得到了很好的理解，但关于成人与儿童之间的预备讨论如何影响儿童对未来事件的体验和记忆的研究却很少。我们的研究解决了这一差距。它在医疗、教育和其他环境中具有重要意义，在这些环境中，确保事先提供的信息增加儿童对经验的理解至关重要。更一般地说，在指定最佳亲子互动时，研究结果也与旨在增强早期心理和情绪弹性的干预措施有关。

To optimise cognitive and emotional development, it is critical to identify the influences on children's lives. How parent-child conversations about the past shape development is well understood, but scant research has examined how adult-child preparatory discussions influence children's experience and memory of future events. Our research addresses this gap. It has important implications in medical, educational, and other contexts in which it is vital to ensure that information given in advance increases children's understanding of an experience. More generally, in specifying optimal parent-child interactions, the findings are also relevant to interventions aiming to enhance psychological and emotional resilience in the early years.