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Research has shown that false-memory production is enhanced for material that is emotionally congruent with the mood of the participant at the time of encoding. So far this research has only been conducted to examine the influence of generic negative affective mood states and generic negative stimuli on false-memory production. In addition, much of the research is limited as it focuses on valence and arousal dimensions, and fails to take into account the more comprehensive nature of emotions. The current study demonstrates that this effect goes beyond general negative or positive moods and acts at a more discrete emotional level. Participants underwent a standard emotion-induction procedure before listening to negative emotional or neutral associative word lists. The emotions induced, negative word lists, and associated nonpresented critical lures, were related to either fear or anger, 2 negative valence emotions that are also both high in arousal. Results showed that when valence and arousal are controlled for, false memories are more likely to be produced for discrete emotionally congruent compared with incongruent materials. These results support spreading activation theories of false remembering and add to our understanding of the adaptive nature of false-memory production. (PsycINFO Database Record

One of the most extensively investigated topics in the adult memory literature, dual memory processes, has had virtually no impact on the study of early memory development. The authors remove the key obstacles to such research by formulating a trichotomous theory of recall that combines the traditional dual processes of recollection and familiarity with a reconstruction process. The theory is then embedded in a hidden Markov model that measures all 3 processes with low-burden tasks that are appropriate for even young children. These techniques are applied to a large corpus of developmental studies of recall, yielding stable findings about the emergence of dual memory processes between childhood and young adulthood and generating tests of many theoretical predictions. The techniques are extended to the study of healthy aging and to the memory sequelae of common forms of neurocognitive impairment, resulting in a theoretical framework that is unified over 4 major domains of memory research: early development, mainstream adult research, aging, and neurocognitive impairment. The techniques are also extended to recognition, creating a unified dual process framework for recall and recognition.

In this commentary, assumptions about the nature and development of children's false memories as described in a recent article by C. J. Brainerd, V. F. Reyna, and S. J. Ceci (2008; see record 2008-04614-001) are reviewed. Specifically, questions are raised about what drives the development of false memories in fuzzy-trace theory (FTT). Recent studies that challenge a core assumption of FTT, that false memory illusions increase across development as children learn to establish meaningful connections across items (i.e., establish gist), are discussed. An alternative conceptualization of the development of false memory illusions, associative-activation theory (AAT), is presented. AAT provides as viable an account of the development of false memory illusions as does FTT and anticipates a unique set of outcomes that have recently appeared in the developmental literature on false memory illusions.

Reductions in children's retroactive interference were examined with conceptual recoding. Children learned two 10-item lists of toys; items on the 2nd list could also be classified as vehicles. Some children were not told about this 2nd category, whereas others were told either at the end of acquisition or just prior to the retention test 24 hr later. The results showed that (a) children benefited from the recoding instruction, (b) younger but not older children failed to benefit from the recoding manipulation when it occurred just prior to the retention test, and (c) recoding reduced retroactive interference primarily through affecting storage processes. These results provide new evidence concerning the importance of making information distinctive in storage in children's retention.

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test, to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage.

The authors provide a new framework that integrates autobiographical memory with other early achievements (e.g., gesturing, language, concept formation). In this theory, the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory does not require the invocation of specialized neurological or multiple memory mechanisms but rather arises as a natural consequence of developments in related domains including in the "software" that drives general memory functioning. In particular, autobiographical memory emerges contemporaneously with the cognitive self, a knowledge structure whose features serve to organize memories of experiences that happened to "me." Because this cognitive self emerges in the 2nd year of life, the lower limit for early autobiographical memories is set at about 2 years, with subsequent accumulation of memories linked to improvements in children's ability to maintain information in storage.

Classical interference effects were examined in preschool and kindergarten children's paired-associate recall (Experiment 1) and free recall (Experiment 2). Children in the control conditions learned a single picture list, whereas children in the experimental conditions learned 2 picture lists in succession. After 24 hr, children recalled items from the one list they had learned (control conditions), items from only List I (retroactive interference conditions), or items from both lists (modified free-recall conditions). Analyses based on the trace-integrity framework indicated that (a) children were susceptible to interference, (b) the locus of interference effects was at storage, (c) both younger (preschool) and older (kindergarten) children experienced similar amounts of interference, and (d) variations in trace strength generally did not modulate the magnitude of interference effects.

A model of long-term retention was used to eliminate problems in past studies regarding the effects postevent misinformation has on preschoolers' testimony and memory. Half of the 216 preschoolers received a single slide presentation and the remaining half received consecutive presentations until they learned the material to criterion. Children either did not receive postevent information or received either correct or misleading information, presented in narrative or questionnaire form, concerning event details 3 weeks after acquisition. Four weeks after acquisition, all of the children received 4 test trials without further study opportunity. When initial learning was controlled and appropriate measurement techniques were in place, exposure to misleading information encouraged preschoolers to report misinformation. However, the memory-impairing effects of misleading information on original memory were rare.

Effects of reinstatement were examined in 2 1/2-year-olds' (Experiment 1) and 3 1/2-year-olds' (Experiments 2 and 3) long-term retention. Children learned object-location pairings and, 3 weeks later, were provided with postevent information consistent with the originally acquired pairings. One week later (4 weeks since acquisition), children were given 4 test trials. Analyses based on the trace-integrity framework indicated that, regardless of age, reinstatement (a) improved children's long-term retention, (b) affected both forgetting and reminiscence, and (c) affected both storage and retrieval processes, in particular, inoculating memories against storage-related forgetting processes

Most theories suppose that during unconstrained retrieval easy-to-retrieve items will be accessed before hard-to-retrieve items. Recent free-recall studies have supported a different access order, the cognitive triage pattern, in which hard-to-retrieve items are accessed first. The present experiments demonstrated that this pattern enhances total recall. In Experiments 1-3, clustering type measures of goodness of triage (grouping output according to items' levels of retrievability) predicted total recall in children and adults. In Experiments 4 and 5, goodness-of-triage measures predicted total recall when they were derived from on-line information about retrievability (error-success histories), but not when they were derived from normative information about retrievability (frequency and meaningfulness ratings)

The authors provide a critical evaluation of the use of stochastic independence in psychological research. Specifically, they consider problems of confirming the null hypothesis, power of the statistical test, Simpson's paradox, and between-subjects and within-subject correlations. These problems are discussed in the context of research on theories of memory and cognitive development and illustrated with data on reasoning-remembering relationships. The authors conclude that demonstrations of response independence do not, by themselves, provide sufficient grounds for deciding whether a single process or multiple processes are necessary to account for performance. Instead, they argue that formal models are necessary if findings of (in)dependence are to be interpreted meaningfully in terms of underlying theoretical processes.

When children and adults retrieve words during unconstrained recall, it is commonly supposed that words will present themselves to consciousness in decreasing order of memory strength, which means that their order of readout should be stronger --~ weaker. In contrast, fuzzy-trace theory proposes a counterintuitive nonmonotonic relationship between order of readout and memory strength. This relationship, which we call cognitive triage, arises from the theory's interpretation of recall as a dynamic system in which the influences of three variables (memory strength, episodic activation, and output interference) must be balanced to maximize recall. Because fuzzy-trace theory anticipates ontogenetic variations in cognitive triage, we studied it developmentally. A series of nine experiments produced several findings that were consistent with the theory's assumptions: Children never recalled stronger words before weaker words, doing the reverse instead; the priority of weaker words over stronger words in output queues was observed in the earliest phases of learning in both younger and older children; as learning progressed and children secured more reliable information about the relative memory strengths of words, a weaker--~ stronger --~ weaker ordering emerged, and it emerged more rapidly in older children; at criterion, when all items were recallable, the weaker ~ stronger --~ weaker ordering was present at all age levels, although it was more pronounced in older children. We show how the theory's assumptions also explain some classic findings about the development of recall, especially subjective organization and serial-position effects.

Les sujets doivent atteindre un critere rigoureux de reussite dans une tâche d'apprentissage de listes de triades de mots (chacune des triades comprenant un indice et deux cibles). Dans l'experience 1, le degre de connaissance pre-experimentale est manipule en l'absence de relations semantiques entre les membres des groupes associatifs; dans l'experience 2, il y a relation semantique entre les membres des groupes. Les donnees d'acquisition des deux experiences sont analysees au moyen d'un modele mathematique qui tient compte des niveaux d'apprentissage

Dans les experiences d'apprentissage de liste, les interactions âge-traitement sont considerees comme une importante source d'information sur la localisation des deficits mnesiques emmagasinage-recouvrement dus a l'âge chez l'adulte. Les auteurs decrivent deux experiences dans lesquelles ces problemes sont etudies dans le contexte des effets de la concretude des items chez de jeunes adultes et des sujets âges dans des situations de rappel libre