Age-related Changes in Confusion between Memories for Thoughts and Memories for Speech

Abstract

The present experiments compared people's abilities to make decisions about the origin of their memories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that 6-year-olds were as good as 17-year-olds in discriminating memories originating from what they said earlier (self-generations) from memories of what another person said earlier (external presentations). However, in both experiments 1 and 2, 6-year-olds were not as good at discriminating what they had said earlier from what they had only thought. The possibility that younger children simply have more difficulty distinguishing between memories originating from the same class, internal or external, was ruled out because 6-year-olds performed as well as 9-year-olds when differentiating between memories from 2 external sources (experiment 2). Nor could their difficulty be attributed to a general problem in distinguishing memories for their thoughts from any other class of memories because they were at no disadvantage in discriminating their earlier thoughts (words they imagined themselves saying) from words someone else said (experiment 2). Our findings suggest that some distinctions, self versus other, emerge as cues in memory sooner than other distinctions, thoughts versus actions.

Three Types of Source Monitoring by Children With and Without Autism: The Role of Executive Function

“…In contrast, based on a procedure introduced by Foley, Johnson, and Raye (1983), Farrant et al (1998) found that, against their predictions, high functioning individuals with autism were unimpaired on a reality-monitoring task. In this procedure a list of words was presented sequentially by a voice on an audiotape.…”

“…The pattern of results usually obtained for typically developing children is that reality monitoring is the first ability to emerge, with children performing close to adult levels by approximately 6 years of age (e.g., Foley & Johnson, 1985;Parker, 1995). Both external and internal monitoring are later to emerge (e.g., Day, Howie, & Markham, 1998, Foley & Johnson, 1985Foley et al, 1983;Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991;Markham, 1991;Parker, 1995). That is, typically developing children find it easiest to report whether the self or other carried out an action and harder to report either which of two other agents had carried out an action or to report when only a single agent, themselves, carried out the action overtly (e.g., said a word outloud) or ''internally' (thought the word silently).…”

“…Based on Farrant et al (1998) and Foley et al (1983) we compiled these scores by summing words incorrectly identified as new when they were old (misses) and words incorrectly identified as old when they were new (false alarms). The mean number of errors (and standard deviations) for each group in each condition was, for children with autism: reality condition 10.1 (2.5), external condition 10.6 (5.0), internal condition 10.0 (3.37), and for typically developing children: reality condition 7.0 (4.2), external condition 8.1 (3.9), internal condition 8.6 (3.5).…”

“…The mean number of words correctly identified as being ''old'' words and correctly attributed to source are shown in lines three and four of Table II. To analyze children's ability to correctly identify the Differences source of the words they had heard before, following Farrant et al (1998) and Foley et al (1983), a ''discrimination proportion'' score for source was created. This score was calculated for each child by summing the number of words correctly identified for source and dividing this total from the number of words correctly identified as words heard before.…”

External source monitoring in a real‐life event: developmental changes in ability to identify source persons

“…Foley & Johnson, 1985;Foley, Harris, & Hermann, 1994;Parker, 1995). In addition, several researches have examined external source-monitoring ability to discriminate two other-generated actions (Foley, Johnson, & Raye, 1983;Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991).…”