Children's memory errors reveal the kinds of processing that may occur during source-monitoring judgments. After symbolically enacting everyday actions using toys or substitutes, preschoolers were more likely to claim they played with a toy when a substitute was involved as the instrument of action than the reverse (Experiments 1-3). We interpret this bias as evidence for the importance of the functional similarity between actions for children's source-monitoring judgments.The intermingling of reality and fantasy is thought to be more pronounced for children than for adults. Anecdotal reports of children's tendencies to mistake fantasy characters as "real" as well as their insistence on the reality status of their imaginary companions help to perpetuate this notion. Piaget (1962, p. 168) suggested that this developmental difficulty in discriminating real from make-believe was because "the child has detected a shade of difference between what is true and what is simply imagined" (before 7 or 8 years of age). Along similar lines, Vygotsky (1962) wrote that "up to the age of 7 or 8, play dominates in child thought to such an extent that it is very hard to tell deliberate inventions from fantasy that the child believes to be the truth" (p. 13).Children's attention is captured by many events that occur at this intersection between reality and make-believe. Whether watching cartoon characters interact, watching more realisticlooking villains threaten people, or listening to scary stories, young children often ask if these events are real or could really happen. In fact, when fictional events are emotionally arousing, even older children seek reassurance about the reality status of what they are experiencing (Bretherton, 1984). Children's understanding of the reality status of events changes considerably
Past research on the effects of articulatory suppression on working memory for nonverbal sounds has been characterized by discrepant findings, which suggests that multiple mechanisms may be involved in the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds. In two experiments we examined the potential roles of two theoretical mechanisms of verbal working memory-articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing-in the maintenance of memory for short melodies. In both experiments, participants performed a same-different melody comparison task. During an 8-s retention interval, interference tasks were introduced to suppress articulatory rehearsal, attentional refreshing, or both. In Experiment 1, only the conditions that featured articulatory suppression resulted in worse memory performance than in a control condition, and the suppression of both attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal concurrently did not impair memory more than articulatory suppression alone. Experiment 2 reproduced these findings and also confirmed that the locus of interference was articulatory and not auditory (i.e., the interference was not attributable to the sound of participants' own voices during articulatory suppression). Both experiments suggested that articulatory rehearsal played a role in the maintenance of melodies in memory, whereas attentional refreshing did not. We discuss potential theoretical implications regarding the mechanisms used for the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds in working memory.
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