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The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children's (11 to 12 years of age) and adults' spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of the false memory effect and a demonstration of a DRM word list and an associated recognition task. It was hypothesized that children would have fewer false memories than adults using the DRM paradigm and that forewarning would reduce the number of critical lures remembered by children and adults. We found a developmental reversal effect in that children had lower false memory levels than adults and that forewarning reduced, but did not eliminate, false memory propensity in both children and adults. Our findings further indicated that forewarning was more effective in reducing false memory levels in 11- to 12-year-old children than in adults. Finally, analyses revealed that participants were more accurate when they received a forewarning as compared to when they did not.

In child custody cases, children oftentimes provide allegations of experienced trauma against one of their parents. Such allegations can happen before any investigative interviews (e.g., by the police or child protective services) have taken place. A central theme here concerns how to appraise such allegations and make certain that children's accounts are taken seriously. In the current special issue, the focus is on new work on the functioning of children's memory and its relation to trauma or work on children's suggestibility and memory when they are traumatized. Specifically, key experts in the field of children's memory provided contributions on: (1) the impact of interviewer support and rapport building on children's testimonies, (2) the role of parental alienation in children's testimonial accuracy, and (3) different types of false memories in children's memory reports.

We examined whether typical developmental trends in suggestion-induced false memories (i.e., age-related decrease) could be changed. Using theoretical principles from the spontaneous false memory field, we adapted 2 often-used false memory procedures: misinformation (Experiment 1) and memory conformity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 7- to 9-year-old children (n = 33) and adults (n = 39) received stories containing associatively related details. They then listened to misinformation in the form of short narratives preserving the meaning of the story. Children and adults were equally susceptible to the misinformation effect. In Experiment 2, younger (7- to 8-year-olds, n = 30) and older (11- to 12-year-olds, n = 30) children and adults (n = 30) viewed pictures containing associatively related details. They viewed these pictures in pairs. Although the pictures differed, participants believed they had viewed the same pictures. Participants had to report what they could recollect during collaborative and individual recall tests. Children and adults were equally susceptible to memory conformity effects. When correcting for response bias, adults' false memory scores were even higher than children's. Our results show that age trends in suggestion-induced false memories are not developmentally invariant. (PsycINFO Database Record

Witnesses are frequently questioned immediately following a crime. The effects of such testing on false recall are inconclusive: Testing may inoculate against subsequent misinformation or enhance false memory formation. We examined whether different types of processing can account for these discrepancies. Drawing from Fuzzy-trace and Associative-activation theories, immediate questions that trigger the processing of the global understanding of the event can heighten false memory rates. However, questions that trigger the processing of specific details can inoculate memories against subsequent misinformation. These effects were hypothesized to be more pronounced in children than in adults. Seven/eight-, 11/12-, 14/15-year-olds, and adults (N = 220) saw a mock-theft film and were tested immediately with meaning or item-specific questions. Test results on the succeeding day replicated classic misinformation and testing effects, although our processing hypothesis was not supported. Only adults who received meaning questions benefited from immediate testing and, across all ages, testing led to retrieval-enhanced suggestibility. © 2016 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Maltreated (n=26) and non-maltreated (n=31) 7- to 12-year-old children were tested on the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory task using emotional and neutral word lists. True recall was significantly better for non-maltreated than maltreated children regardless of list valence. The proportion of false recall for neutral lists was comparable regardless of maltreatment status. However, maltreated children showed a significantly higher false recall rate for the emotional lists than non-maltreated children. Together, these results provide new evidence that maltreated children could be more prone to false memory illusions for negatively valenced information than their non-maltreated counterparts.

Among many legal professionals and memory researchers there exists the assumption that susceptibility to false memory decreases with age. In four misinformation experiments, we show that under conditions that focus on the meaning of experiences, children are not always the most susceptible to suggestion-induced false memories. We begin by presenting a short overview of previous developmental false memory studies, the majority of which have found that the susceptibility to misinformation decreases with age. In Experiment 1, 6/7-year-olds, 11/12-year-olds, and adults received a video and were confronted with misinformation about related but non-presented details. Older children and adults had higher misinformation acceptance rates than younger children. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding adding a younger child group (4/6-year-olds). In Experiments 3 and 4, we used new material and again found that susceptibility to misinformation increased with age. Together, these experiments show that children’s memory accuracy is not necessarily inferior to that of adults’.

Suggestibility is regarded as a major issue when children testify in court. Many legal professionals and memory researchers view children as inferior witnesses. Although differences in suggestibility exist between children and adults, they are much more complex than is usually assumed. We show that under certain conditions, adults are more susceptible than children to suggestion and false memories. We provide evidence that age-related shifts in suggestibility and false memory appear contingent on how quickly and automatically children and adults make associations when experiencing events. Specifically, when confronted with suggestive information about a related but nonexperienced detail, adults more frequently automatically generate links between items experienced and those already in memory, making them more susceptible to suggestion than children. ispartof: CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE vol:27 issue:5 pages:378-385 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Recent research has shown that memory illusions can successfully prime both children's and adults' performance on complex, insight-based problems (compound remote associates tasks or CRATs). The current research aimed to clarify the locus of these priming effects. Like before, Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) lists were selected to prime subsequent CRATs such that the critical lures were also the solution words to a subset of the CRATs participants attempted to solve. Unique to the present research, recognition memory tests were used and participants were either primed during the list study phase, during the memory test phase, or both. Across two experiments, primed problems were solved more frequently and significantly faster than unprimed problems. Moreover, when participants were primed during the list study phase, subsequent solution times and rates were considerably superior to those produced by those participants who were simply primed at test. Together, these are the first results to show that false-memory priming during encoding facilitates problem-solving in both children and adults.

In clinical and court settings, it is imperative to know whether posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression may make people susceptible to false memories. We conducted a review of the literature on false memory effects in participants with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression. When emotional associative material was presented to these groups, their levels of false memory were raised relative to those in relevant comparison groups. This difference did not consistently emerge when neutral or nonassociative material was presented. Our conclusion is supported by a quantitative comparison of effect sizes between studies using emotional associative or neutral, nonassociative material. Our review suggests that individuals with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression are at risk for producing false memories when they are exposed to information that is related to their knowledge base.

The current experiment was designed to assess the mnemonic consequences of false denials and forced confabulations. Children (aged 6–8 and 10–12 years) and adults viewed a video and then their memory and belief about the event were tested. Participants were then divided into three groups. In the “cued recall” condition, participants were asked to answer true- and false-event questions, but could choose not to respond if they did not know the answer. In the “forced confabulation” group, participants received the same set of questions, but were forced to answer all of them. In the “false denial” group, participants were instructed to falsely deny in response to each question. One week later, participants received a source memory test, and they had to provide memory and belief ratings once more. Forced confabulations resulted in false memories in the youngest group. Moreover, our analyses showed that repeated false denials led children and adults to be highly inclined to falsely deny that they had talked to the experimenter about certain presented details, when in fact they had done so. Furthermore, false denial and non-believed memory rates were more pronounced in younger than in older children and adults. Our results imply that denying experienced events is not a good strategy in an interviewing setting, as it adversely affects memory statements about the interview.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of emotional mood states on the ability to create effective primes using the recently developed false memory priming paradigm. A negative or positive mood state was induced before Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list presentation. A further control group experienced no mood induction. Participants were then presented with Compound Remote Associate Task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been primed by the previous DRM lists whose critical lure was the solution to the CRAT problem. The results of this study showed that induction of a negative mood state not only impaired recall of critical lures but also diminished their effectiveness as primes for solving CRAT problems. In contrast, for both positive mood and control conditions, the false memory priming advantage was evident, with a higher proportion of primed problems solved in comparison to those not primed. Findings are discussed in relation to the role of affect on semantic activation and the adaptive consequences of false memories.

An emerging area of memory research is showing that a certain type of false memory called spontaneous false memories follows a developmental trajectory that is the opposite of what is commonly assumed in false memory research. That is, spontaneous false memories are more likely to occur in adults than in children. The present study focused on developmental trends of different types of spontaneous false memories. Specifically, in the current study, 6-8-year-olds, 10-12-year-olds, and adults were presented with two methods to induce spontaneous false memories. That is, participants were presented with semantically-related words lists that are commonly used to evoke spontaneous false memories (i.e, Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). Furthermore, they were presented with a video in which related details were not shown but were presented during a recognition task. Our results showed that children were more likely to form false memories than adults in the video false memory paradigm whereas DRM false memories were more evident in adults than in children. Furthermore, we found that on a general level, DRM false memories were positively related to video spontaneous false memories. We explain that stimuli that contain obvious themes attenuate or even reverse developmental trends in spontaneous false memories.

The brain combines visual, vestibular and proprioceptive information to distinguish between self- and world motion. Often these signals are complementary and indicate that the individual is moving or stationary with respect to the surroundings. However, conflicting visual motion and vestibular cues can lead to ambiguous or false sensations of motion. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore human brain activation when visual and vestibular cues were either complementary or in conflict. We combined a horizontally moving optokinetic stimulus with caloric irrigation of the right ear to produce conditions where the vestibular activation and visual motion indicated the same (congruent) or opposite directions of self-motion (incongruent). Visuo-vestibular conflict was associated with increased activation in a network of brain regions including posterior insular and transverse temporal areas, cerebellar tonsil, cingulate and medial frontal gyri. In the congruent condition, there was increased activation in primary and secondary visual cortex. These findings suggest that when sensory information regarding self-motion is contradictory, there is preferential activation of multisensory vestibular areas to resolve this ambiguity. When cues are congruent, there is a bias towards visual cortical activation. The data support the view that a network of brain areas including the posterior insular cortex may play an important role in integrating and disambiguating visual and vestibular cues.

In three experiments we investigated the role of automatic and controlled inhibitory retrieval processes in true and false memory development in children and adults. Experiment 1 incorporated a directed forgetting task to examine controlled retrieval inhibition. Experiments 2 and 3 utilized a part-set cue and retrieval practice task to examine automatic retrieval inhibition. In the first experiment, the forget cue had no effect on false recall for adults but reduced false recall for children. In Experiments 2 and 3, both tasks caused retrieval impairments for true and false recall, and this occurred for all age groups. Implicit inhibition, which occurs outside of our conscious control, appears early in childhood. However, because young children do not process false memories as automatically as adults, explicit inhibition can reduce false memory output.

The authors examined 284 maltreated and nonmaltreated children's (6- to 12-year-olds) ability to inhibit true and false memories for neutral and emotional information using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Children studied either emotional or neutral DRM lists in a control condition or were given directed-remembering or directed-forgetting instructions. The findings indicated that children, regardless of age and maltreatment status, could inhibit the output of true and false emotional information, although they did so less effectively than when they were inhibiting the output of neutral material. Verbal IQ was related to memory, but dissociative symptoms were not related to children's recollective ability. These findings add to the growing literature that shows more similarities among, than differences between, maltreated and nonmaltreated children's basic memory processes.

This investigation examined basic memory processes, cortisol, and dissociation in maltreated children. School-aged children (age range = 6-13), 143 maltreated and 174 nonmaltreated, were administered the California Verbal Learning Test-Children (D. C. Delis, J. H. Kramer, E. Kaplan, & B. A. Ober, 1994) in a week-long camp setting, daily morning cortisol levels were assessed throughout the duration of camp, and behavioral symptoms were evaluated. Maltreatment and cortisol regulation were not related to short- or long-delay recall or recognition memory. However, children experiencing neglect and/or emotional maltreatment and low cortisol evinced heightened false recognition memory. Dissociative symptoms were higher in maltreated children; however, high dissociation was related to recognition inaccuracy only among nonmaltreated children. Results highlight the interplay between maltreatment and hypocortisolism in children's recognition memory errors.

For some time now, questions have been asked about the impact of television and video materials on the cognitive and social development of preschoolers and older children. More recently, these same questions have been asked in relation to the extensive exposure to these media that infants and toddlers are currently experiencing. To answer these questions, we review current research that explicitly targets these concerns and provide new insights into the role these media play in early development.

Across five experiments we examined the role of valence in children's and adults' true and false memories. Using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm and either neutral or negative-emotional lists, both adults' (Experiment 1) and children's (Experiment 2) true recall and recognition was better for neutral than negative items, and although false recall was also higher for neutral items, false recognition was higher for negative items. The last three experiments examined adults' (Experiment 3) and children's (Experiments 4 and 5) 1-week long-term recognition of neutral and negative-emotional information. The results replicated the immediate recall and recognition findings from the first two experiments. More important, these experiments showed that although true recognition decreased over the 1-week interval, false recognition of neutral items remained unchanged whereas false recognition of negative-emotional items increased. These findings are discussed in terms of theories of emotion and memory as well as their forensic implications.

The effects of associative strength and gist relations on rates of children’s and adults’ true and false memories were examined in three experiments. Children aged 5–11 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese/Roediger–McDermott false memory task using DRM and category lists in two experiments and in the third, children memorized lists that differed in associative strength and semantic cohesion. In the first two experiments, half of the participants were primed before list presentation with gist-relevant cues and the results showed that: (1) both true and false memories increased with age, (2) true recall was higher than false recall for all ages, (3) at all ages, false memory rates were determined by backward associative strength, and (4) false memories varied predictably with changes in associative strength but were unaffected by gist manipulations (category structure or gist priming). In the third experiment, both gist and associative strength were varied orthogonally and the results showed that regardless of age, children’s (5) true recall was affected by gist manipulations (semantic cohesion) and (6) false recall was affected by backward associative strength. These findings are discussed in the context of models of false memory illusions and continuities in memory development more generally.

The effects of within- versus between-languages (English–French) study and test on rates of bilingual children’s and adults’ true and false memories were examined. Children aged 6 through 12 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory task using free recall and recognition. Recall results showed that: (1) both true and false memories increased with age, (2) true recall was higher in within- than between-languages conditions for all ages, and (3) there were fewer false memories in between-languages conditions than within-language conditions for the youngest children, no differences for the 8 and 12 years old, and by adulthood, there were more false memories in between-languages than within-language conditions. Recognition results showed that regardless of age, false recognition rates tended to be higher in between-languages than within-language conditions. These findings are discussed in the context of models of false memory development.

The role of inhibition in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds') false memory illusions in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was examined using a list-wise directed-forgetting procedure. Children studied either a single DRM list (control) or two DRM lists in succession with a directed-remembering instruction or a directed-forgetting instruction between list presentations. The findings indicated that, like adults, children effectively suppressed the output of true memories when given a directed-forgetting instruction. Unlike adults, whose false memories are not attenuated in directed-forgetting conditions, children suppressed false memories at recall in the directed-forgetting condition. Because recognition data indicated that the children did generate false memories regardless of instruction, it appears that although adults' false memories are generated automatically and do not become part of their conscious experience, children's false memories are produced with greater effort and conscious processing, and as a result are easier to suppress at output.

A study was conducted to evaluate the (1) developmental course and (2) the temporal sequencing of visual (mirror, photo) and verbal (personal pronoun use) measures of self-recognition as well as the ability to locate a toy from its mirror image in relation to the child's own mirror image. A microgenetic approach was adopted to assess 10 toddlers biweekly between 15 and 23 months of age and for comparison, a cross-section of children tested once across the same age range. Longitudinal data indicated that visual self-recognition emerged gradually and showed wide variability in expression prior to becoming stable, a finding masked in the cross-sectional data where performance appeared to improve abruptly. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data confirmed that mirror self-recognition was the earliest precursor of the indices of self-recognition to emerge followed by the use of personal pronouns and photo identification. Implications for the emergence and integration of the self are discussed.

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.

How far back can we, as adults, remember details of our life experiences? Current popular and scientific beliefs are contradictory, with the latter stipulating that personal memories do not begin until the late preschool years (age 4–5 years) and the former claiming that we not only remember being born, but can also remember in utero experiences. In this review, these beliefs are examined in a scientific context and evaluated in terms of empirical data about the development of early memory. The theory proposed here is that memories for personal experiences are not possible until the advent of the cognitive self, around the age of 18 to 24 months. This age is much earlier than that proposed as the age of the earliest memories in other scientific accounts and much later than that proposed in popular beliefs about early memory. New data from a cross-sectional and longitudinal study of early memory development and the emergence of the self clearly show the origins of personal memory coincide with the emergence of the early self.

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.

In the present experiment, we evaluated the effects of individual differences in reading span and variation in memory demands on class-inclusion performance. One hundred twenty college students whose reading spans ranged from low to medium to high (as indexed by a computerized version of the Daneman and Carpenter [1980] reading-span task) solved 48 class-inclusion problems. Half of the subjects had the solution information available when the problems were presented; the other half performed a detection task between solution information and problem presentation. The results from both standard statistical analyses and from a mathematical model indicated that differences in reading span and memory load had predictable, similar effects. Specifically, the sophistication of reasoning strategies declined when memory demands increased or when reading spans decreased. Surprisingly, these effects were primarily additive. The results were interpreted in terms of global resource models and findings from the developmental literature.

The trace integrity framework, including the associated mathematical model, is used to summarize a corpus of data on the development of children's and adults' long-term retention. The purpose of this review is to get some leverage on what role storage and retrieval processes play in the forgetting and subsequent recovery of memory traces. What this review shows is that (1) forgetting is dominated by storage, not retrieval, failures; (2) trace recovery is dominated by retrieval, not storage, operations; and (3) storage failure rates decline with age in childhood, whereas only modest developments occur in retrieval recovery operations. These findings are then applied to current issues concerning adult recall of childhood memories.

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.

We investigated priming of analogical problem solutions with true and false memories. Children and adults were asked to solve nine verbal proportional analogies, three of which had been primed by Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) lists where the critical lure (and problem solution) was presented as the initial word in the list (true memory priming), three of which were primed by DRM lists whose critical lures were the solution to the verbal proportional analogies (false memory priming), and three of which were unprimed. We controlled for age differences in solution rates (knowledge base) in order to examine developmental differences in speed of processing. As anticipated, the results showed that adults completed the problems significantly faster than children. Furthermore, both children and adults solved problems primed with false memories significantly faster than either those primed with true memories or unprimed problems. For both age groups, there was no significant difference between solution times for unprimed and true primed problems. These findings demonstrate that (a) priming of problem solutions extends to verbal proportional analogies, (b) false memories are more effective at priming problem solutions than true memories, and (c) there are clear positive consequences to the production of false memories.

Adults frequently provide compelling, detailed accounts of early childhood experiences in the courtroom. Judges and jurors are asked to decide guilt or innocence based solely on these decades-old memories using 'common sense' notions about memory. However, these notions are not in agreement with findings from neuroscientific and behavioural studies of memory development. Without expert guidance, judges and jurors may have difficulty in properly adjudicating the weight of memory evidence in cases involving adult recollections of childhood experiences.

In 2 experiments, we examined pre-school, grade 1, and grade 3 children's metamemory about long-term retention. Specifically, we examined beliefs about the type of information most likely to be forgotten and beliefs about the impact of suggestions and retroactive interference on memory. Children made and explained paired-comparison judgments concerning the differential forgetting of peripheral versus central information, whether misinformation effects would arise from suggestions by others, and whether retroactive interference would arise from experiencing two similar events. The major findings were that (a) most children believed that events central to a story would be retained better than peripheral details; (b) in preschool and first grade, children believed that memory was invulnerable to suggestion (from a parent or a sibling), but in third grade, children believed suggestion could adversely affect memory; (c) most preschoolers believed that retroactive interference effects would not occur, whereas most first and third graders acknowledged that they would; (d) older children believed that both suggestibility and interference were less likely given a retention interval of several months compared to 1 day; and (e) in explaining their beliefs, children assigned sensory-behavioral factors a major causal role in determining what would be remembered over the long term. These results are discussed in terms of the development of beliefs about memory and the mind in general.

In the current experiment, we evaluated the relationship between reasoning and remembering across the lifespan (10-, 13-, 15-, 23-, and 67-year-olds) using color and number class-inclusion tasks. Subjects made judgments when memory load or information load was either high or low. Reading latency, choice latency, and choice accuracy data were collected and analyzed using formal models that partitioned memory and reasoning as well as type of reasoning strategy. The results showed that: (1) study skills, as indexed by reading latency, were sophisticated across the lifespan; (2) the difference between color and number choice latencies increased with age; (3) reasonably consistent effects were obtained as a function of increasing memory load, with the quality of both reasoning and remembering being adversely affected; (4) different effects were obtained at each age as a function of increasing information load; and (5) the major developmental trend across the lifespan was a tradeoff between class-inclusion and subclass-subclass forms of reasoning. A number of extant theoretical approaches were discussed, none of which were able to account for variations in class-inclusion performance across the lifespan. What was clear, however, was that memory-reasoning dependencies must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of cognitive development across the lifespan.

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.

Several studies have found that children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits have a deficit in processing emotionally negative material. The present study examined whether this deficit also affects emotional memory. Twenty-two children with low CU traits and 24 children with high CU traits between 8 and 12 years of age were selected from a community sample and presented with neutral and negative emotional words, using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. On true recall, there was no difference between the groups. Both groups had higher true recall rates for the neutral word lists than for the negative lists. However, on false recall, although there were no group differences for neutral word lists, the high CU group recalled significantly fewer critical lures on the negative word lists than the low CU group. Furthermore, the high CU group had significantly less false recall on the negative word lists compared to the neutral word lists, while the low CU group showed no difference in false recall between the word lists. These results indicate that children with high CU traits have no deficiencies in true memory performance, yet are less susceptible to developing false memories concerning emotionally negative material.

The present study examined the impact of divided attention on children's and adults' neutral and negative true and false memories in a standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Children (7- and 11-year-olds; n = 126) and adults (n = 52) received 5 neutral and 5 negative Deese/Roediger-McDermott word lists; half of each group also received a divided attention task. The results showed that divided attention affected children's and adults' false memory levels differently but did not alter true memory differently. Our results revealed a developmental shift in that divided attention lowered children's false memory rates but increased adults' false memory rates, regardless of the nature of the material (i.e., neutral or negative). Our study indicates that manipulations that target conscious processing (e.g., divided attention) result in marked qualitative and quantitative differences between children's and adults' false memories but not true memories.

We provide an introduction to the essential constructs involved in dynamic modeling. These constructs are then related to issues in psychological development. In particular, we discuss stages, states, sequences, and pure transition models as well as cross-sectional and longitudinal experimental designs. We conclude that transition is a key invariance in development and that single subject, longitudinal designs are essential in studying the dynamics of ontogeny.

In this article, we focus on two issues, namely, the nature and onset of very early personal memories, especially for traumatic events, and the role of stress in long-term retention. We begin by outlining a theory of early autobiographical memory, one whose unfolding is coincident with emergence of the cognitive self. It is argued that it is not until this self emerges that personal memories will remain viable over extended periods of time. We illustrate this with 25 cases of young children′s long-term retention of early traumatic events involving emergency room treatment. On the basis of both qualitative (case profiles) and quantitative (analysis of covariance) analyses, we conclude that (a) very young children (under the age of 2 years) retain limited memories for events which they commonly express behaviorally, (b) coherent autobiographical memories are not constructed until the child develops a cognitive sense of self (on average, at 24 months of age), (c) autobiographical memories for traumatic events are essentially no different from those for nontraumatic events, (d) stress is only related to long-term retention inasmuch as it is one variable that serves to make an event unique, and (e) like nontraumatic events, traumatic memories lose peripheral details during the retention interval and retain the central components of the event. These results are discussed both in terms of their implications for theories of early autobiographical memory as well as the ways in which we might differentiate implanted (or false) memories and authentic memories for traumatic events.

Three experiments investigated the effects of test-induced priming (TIP) on false recognition in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In Experiment 1, TIP significantly increased false recognition for participants who made old/new decisions at test but not for participants who made remember/know judgments or were given diagnostic information to help them avoid false recognition. In Experiment 2, a TIP effect was observed with old/new recognition but not when participants were required to remember whether study items were spoken by a male or a female speaker. In Experiment 3, false recognition increased when critical lures were preceded by 10 studied items but not when preceded by 5 studied and 5 unstudied items from the same list. These findings suggest that TIP increases false recognition by disrupting source monitoring processes.

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm was used to investigate the effect of depression on true and false recognition. In this experiment, true and false recognition was examined across positive, neutral, negative, and depression-relevant lists for individuals with and without a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. Results showed that participants with major depressive disorder falsely recognized significantly more depression-relevant words than non-depressed controls. These findings also parallel recent research using recall instead of recognition and show that there are clear mood congruence effects for depression on false memory performance.

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

The effect of test-induced priming on false recognition was investigated in children aged 5, 7, 9, and 11 years using lists of semantic associates, category exemplars, and phonological associates. Consistent with effects previously observed in adults, nine- and eleven-year-olds showed increased levels of false recognition when critical lures were preceded by four studied items. This pattern was present with all three list types. In contrast, no effects of test-induced priming were observed in five- or seven-year-olds with any list type. The findings also support those of previous studies in showing a developmental shift from phonological to semantic false memories. The findings are discussed in terms of current theories of children’s false memories.

In two experiments, we investigated the robustness and automaticity of adults' and children's generation of false memories by using a levels-of-processing paradigm (Experiment 1) and a divided attention paradigm (Experiment 2). The first experiment revealed that when information was encoded at a shallow level, true recognition rates decreased for all ages. For false recognition, when information was encoded on a shallow level, we found a different pattern for young children compared with that for older children and adults. False recognition rates were related to the overall amount of correctly remembered information for 7-year-olds, whereas no such association was found for the other age groups. In the second experiment, divided attention decreased true recognition for all ages. In contrast, children's (7- and 11-year-olds) false recognition rates were again dependent on the overall amount of correctly remembered information, whereas adults' false recognition was left unaffected. Overall, children's false recognition rates changed when levels of processing or divided attention was manipulated in comparison with adults. Together, these results suggest that there may be both quantitative and qualitative changes in false memory rates with age.

The effects of embedding standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition were investigated with 7- and 11-year-olds. These biased story contexts were compared with the same children's susceptibility to false memory illusions using the standard DRM list presentation paradigm. The results showed the usual age effects for true and false memories in the standard DRM list paradigm, where 11-year-olds exhibited higher rates of both true and false recognition compared with the 7-year-olds. Importantly, when DRM lists were embedded in stories, these age effects disappeared for true recognition. For false recognition, although developmental differences were attenuated, older children were still more susceptible to false memory illusions than younger children. These findings are discussed in terms of current theories of children's false memories as well as the role of themes and elaboration in children's memory development.

We investigated children’s ability to generate associations and how automaticity of associative activation unfolds developmentally. Children generated associative responses using a single associate paradigm (Experiment 1) or a Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM)-like multiple associates paradigm (Experiment 2). The results indicated that children’s ability to generate meaningful word associates, and the automaticity with which they were generated, increased between 5, 7, and 11 years of age. These findings suggest that children’s domain-specific knowledge base and the associative connections among related concepts are present and continue to develop from a very early age. Moreover, there is an increase in how these concepts are automatically activated with age, something that results from domain-general developments in speed of processing. These changes are consistent with the neurodevelopmental literature and together may provide a more complete explanation of the development of memory illusions.

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.

Distinctiveness effects in children’s (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese–Roediger–McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were photographed with heterogeneous colored backgrounds, developmental trends were eliminated relative to words and homogeneous backgrounds. Experiments 3 and 4 examined whether the conceptual nature of the background mattered and presented items in neutral (color only), theme-congruent, or theme-incongruent contexts. The results showed that the nature of the context did not matter, only whether the backgrounds were homogeneous or heterogeneous. Apparently, children use distinctive perceptual, but not conceptual, features to attenuate false memory illusions.