Children's expectations and episodic reports over 12 weeks: Influences on memory for a specially designed pediatric examination

Abstract

Summary This investigation extended work on the linkage between knowledge and remembering by exploring the relation between generic and episodic memory representations. Thirty 6‐year‐old children experienced a mock physical examination with some expected components omitted and other unexpected actions included. Immediately and again after 12 weeks, the children reported the event, answered questions about what usually happens in an examination, and rated their confidence in aspects of their reports. They remembered more typical than atypical present components, that is, those included in the examination, and, over time, falsely reported more typical than atypical actions. The children produced intrusions of expected‐but‐omitted medical features at the delay but with lower confidence ratings than they provided for correctly recalled items. Performance on a source monitoring task was associated with aspects of the children's confidence ratings for intrusions. The findings provide evidence that the relation between episodic and generic representations is dynamic and suggest that the capacity to differentiate between them contributes to the development of accurate eyewitness memory.

Consistency amongst pairs: How consistent are child co‐witnesses with one another?

“…The comparable consistency between co‐witnesses when reporting event details at both interviews may be due to memory consolidation during the initial interview (Geiselman et al, 1986; Paterson et al, 2015). In addition to the memory consolidation that may have occurred, the delay between the first and second interview was only a few days; children would likely rely on their event schemas to reconstruct the event to a greater extent after longer delays, which may generate more variability in recall (Baker‐Ward et al, 2020; Hudson & Mayhew, 2009).…”

“…After a delay, people are likely to rely on general event knowledge to reconstruct an experience due to reduced accessibility of episodic memories. That is, when event details are not retrieved, general knowledge is unconsciously used to fill the gaps (e.g., Baker‐Ward et al, 2020; Ornstein et al, 1997). Although this process can help reconstruct what occurred, there are likely to be discrepancies in how children use general knowledge to guide recall, either because they use a similar general knowledge framework in different ways (e.g., one child decides their temperature was checked while another decides their ears were checked when they saw the doctor), or because they utilise different general knowledge structures to reconstruct what occurred when the event is novel.…”

Children's long‐term memory for a staged repeated event: A preliminary investigation

“…Details that vary across individual experiences of the event (i.e., occurrences), but belong to a common category are represented on a general level as an item; item slots are filled by a lower‐level list of associated instantiations — specific details that were experienced during an event occurrence (Nelson & Gruendel, 1981). Especially after a short delay, children can recall what happened during an occurrence of a repeated event quite well, but as children's representations of specific event occurrences decay, they become increasingly reliant on scripts to reconstruct each occurrence (Baker‐Ward et al, 2020; Hudson & Mayhew, 2009).…”