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Emotional valence and working memory ability (WM) affect false memories' production in adults. Whereas a number of studies have investigated the role of emotional valence in children's tendency to produce spontaneous false memories, individual differences in WM have not been previously included. In the current article, we were interested in investigating whether emotion and WM would interact in influencing the propensity to incur inferential false memories for scripted events. Ninety-eight typically developing children (first-, third-, and eighth- graders) were administered the Emotional false memory paradigm - allowing to study false memories for negative, positive, and neutral events - and a WM task. Results showed that regardless of age, valence influenced false memories' production, such that positive events protected against incurring distortions. Furthermore, WM interacted with valence, such that children with higher WM abilities produced fewer false memories for negative events. Concerning confidence judgments, only the youngest group of children claimed to be overconfident when committing false memories for negative and neutral events. Results are discussed in terms of the role of individual differences in higher cognitive abilities interacting with the emotional content of to-be-remembered events., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Mirandola and Pazzaglia.)

The ability to assess and monitor one's own understanding of a written text is fundamental for learning and academic achievement. In the current paper, postdictive monitoring of text comprehension (i.e., the ability to judge the accuracy of responses previously given to a reading comprehension test) was investigated in both typically developing (TD) children and children with reading comprehension difficulties. Children from primary school (3rd to 5th grade) and secondary school (6th to 8th grade) participated in the study ( N = 245). They were administered standardized tasks for reading comprehension, in which they had to read two texts and answer 12 multiple-choice questions after each text; subsequently, they had to provide postdictive judgments evaluating their performance: for each answer they had to select whether they judged it as correct, incorrect or whether they were uncertain. Two scores were calculated: Bias score, indicating the difference between metacognitive judgments of accuracy and actual performance; and Accurate estimation, indicating the sum of correct answers judged as "correct" and incorrect answers judged as "incorrect." Results showed that primary school children were more overconfident than secondary school children and made fewer Accurate estimations especially for "correct" responses. Furthermore, the consideration of a group of children with reading comprehension difficulties showed that these failures are linked to worse metacognitive monitoring ability of comprehension performance in comparison not only to age-matched controls but also to the TD group of third-graders. Implications for learning and achievement are discussed.