Developmentally invariant dissociations in children's true and false memories: not all relatedness is created equal

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00922.x Byline: Mark L Howe (1) Abstract: The role of categorical versus associative relations in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children's true and false memories was examined using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm and categorized lists of pictures or words with or without category labels as primes. For true items, recall increased with age and categorized lists were better recalled than DRM lists. For false items, recall increased with age except for picture lists, there were no differences between categorized and DRM lists and no effect of priming, and there were fewer false memories for pictures than words. Like adults, children's false memories are based on associative not thematic relations, whereas their veridical memories depend on both. This new, developmentally invariant dissociation is consistent with knowledge- and resource-based models of memory development. Author Affiliation: (1)Lancaster University Article note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark L. Howe, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, U.K. Electronic mail may be sent to mark.howe@lancaster.ac.uk.