Search

We report the 1st example of a true complementarity effect in memory development--a situation in which memory for the "same event" simultaneously becomes more and less accurate between early childhood and adulthood. We investigated this paradoxical effect because fuzzy-trace theory predicts that it can occur in paradigms that produce developmental reversals in false memory, which are circumstances in which adults are more likely than children to remember new events as old. The complementarity prediction is this: If subjects separately judge whether those same events are new but similar to old ones, adults will be more accurate than children, even though adults are less accurate when they judge whether the items are old. We report 4 experiments in which children (6- and 10-year-olds), adolescents (14-year-olds), and adults encoded the modal developmental reversal materials: Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists. Then, they responded to memory tests on which half the subjects judged whether test items were old and half judged whether the same items were new-similar. The paradoxical complementarity effect was detected in all experiments: The tendency to falsely remember "new-similar" items as being old increased with development, but so did the tendency to correctly remember them as being new-similar.

A hoary assumption of the law is that children are more prone to false-memory reports than adults, and hence, their testimony is less reliable than adults'. Since the 1980s, that assumption has been buttressed by numerous studies that detected declines in false memory between early childhood and young adulthood under controlled conditions. Fuzzy-trace theory predicted reversals of this standard developmental pattern in circumstances that are directly relevant to testimony because they involve using the gist of experience to remember events. That prediction has been investigated during the past decade, and a large number of experiments have been published in which false memories have indeed been found to increase between early childhood and young adulthood. Further, experimentation has tied age increases in false memory to improvements in children's memory for semantic gist. According to current scientific evidence, the principle that children's testimony is necessarily more infected with false memories than adults' and that, other things being equal, juries should regard adults' testimony as necessarily more faithful to actual events is untenable. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

Do the emotional valence and arousal of events distort children's memories? Do valence and arousal modulate counterintuitive age increases in false memory? We investigated those questions in children, adolescents, and adults using the Cornell/Cortland Emotion Lists, a word list pool that induces false memories and in which valence and arousal can be manipulated factorially. False memories increased with age for unpresented semantic associates of word lists, and net accuracy (the ratio of true memory to total memory) decreased with age. These surprising developmental trends were more pronounced for negatively valenced materials than for positively valenced materials, they were more pronounced for high-arousal materials than for low-arousal materials, and developmental increases in the effects of arousal were small in comparison with developmental increases in the effects of valence. These findings have ramifications for legal applications of false memory research; materials that share the emotional hallmark of crimes (events that are negatively valenced and arousing) produced the largest age increases in false memory and the largest age declines in net accuracy. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

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. (Contains 5 footnotes, 8 tables, and 12 figures.)

S. Ghetti (2008) and M. L. Howe (2008) presented probative ideas for future research that will deepen scientific understanding of developmental reversals on false memory and establish boundary conditions for these counterintuitive patterns. Ghetti extended the purview of current theoretical principles by formulating hypotheses about how developmental reversals are controlled by the growth of phantom recollection and by the growth of false-memory editing. Some data are available on her hypotheses about phantom recollection, which distinguish phenomenology (vague or vivid) from memory representation (verbatim or gist). Howe introduced alternative theoretical principles that can be traced to the early work of Deese and Underwood. He argued that fuzzy-trace theory is subject to 3 limitations and that his alternative conception makes 3 predictions that contrast with fuzzy-trace theory's predictions. In the current reply, it is shown that the stated limitations do not apply to fuzzy-trace theory, that previously published research runs counter to the 3 predictions, and that the core difference between the 2 approaches is that fuzzy-trace theory is an opponent-processes model whereas the alternative conception is a 1-process model. (Contains 1 figure.)

Two remembering phenomenologies, vivid recollection and vague familiarity, have been extensively studied in adults using introspective self-report tasks, such as rememberknow. Because such tasks are beyond the capabilities of young children, there is no database on how these phenomenologies first develop and what factors affect them. In experiments with 5- to 14-year-olds, a child-appropriate behavioral methodology (conjoint recognition) was used to measure these phenomenologies. For both true and false memory, there were marked age increases in vivid recollective experiences, coupled with only slight increases in vague familiarity experiences. Thus, there is a vague-to-vivid developmental shift in the mental states that accompany remembering, a finding that is predicted by fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of recollection and familiarity.

Presents new measure of children's use of an editing operation that suppresses false memories by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Application of the methodology showed that false-memory editing increased dramatically between early and middle childhood. Measure reacted appropriately to experimental manipulations. Developmental reductions in incidence of false-memory reports were primarily due to developmental improvements in verbatim memory. (Author/KB)

Presents a unified theoretical approach to children's false-memory reports that deals with both spontaneous and implanted reports. Details false recognition and misinformation models that allow researchers to determine the impact of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment in false memory reports. (LBT)

Reyna and Brainerd supplement arguments they made previously in this issue by advancing five additional reasons for preferring output-interference explanations over the resources hypothesis. (RH)

Proposes an interference explanation of data from dual-task studies of memory development. Dual-task data support the resources hypothesis that memory processes tax a common pool of cognitive energy, which has been variously called attentional, mental effort, and working-memory capacities. Suggests that dual-task deficits are instances of output interference between otherwise independent systems. (RH)