Just the facts or just for fun? Children's understanding of and sensitivity to retelling contexts

Abstract

Adults appear to recognize that different memory sharing contexts, such as telling a story to a friend at a party versus providing eyewitness testimony, vary in their accuracy demands and adjust their retellings accordingly. There is less evidence that children are able to make the same distinctions. In the present two-part experiment, we first tested 6-8-year-old children's beliefs about the accuracy requirements of different memory sharing contexts that varied on the listener's implicit expectation about accuracy. Children were then read a short story and were given retelling instructions that emphasized accuracy or entertainment. Results from the first task indicated that children evidence a significant truth bias, suggesting that they believe accurate retellings are preferred regardless of context. Despite this, children did appear to adjust their retellings as a function of context, with retellings in the high accuracy condition including more verbatim and less error statements. Finally, children who evidenced a stronger truth bias were less likely to employ the language of storytelling by producing lower-quality narratives.

Narrative Skills, Gender, Culture, and Children’s Long-Term Memory Accuracy of a Staged Event

“…The present study suggests these children are also more likely to spontaneously include inaccurate information in their free recall memory reports. This finding is in line with the theoretical perspective that parents who socialize their children to tell rich, detailed, and structured narratives may place greater emphasis on entertaining a conversational partner than on maintaining accuracy (e.g., Fivush & Reese, 1992;Kulkofsky & Klemfuss, 2008;Kulkofsky et al, , 2011. It is also important to note that context may play an important role in the association between narrative skills and memory accuracy.…”

“…This finding partially mirrors the positive association between narrative skills and the likelihood of inaccuracy in free recall. The gender interaction may reflect the fact that parents tend to model lengthy, detailed, and rich narratives with their daughters more than with their sons (Adams et al, 1995;Fivush et al, 2003;Kuebli & Fivush, 1992;Reese & Fivush, 1993;Reese et al, 1996), and high-quality narratives have an inverse association with an accuracy focus among children in this age group (Kulkofsky et al, 2011). However, there were minimal gender differences in narrative quality in the present study.…”

“…It is also important to note that context may play an important role in the association between narrative skills and memory accuracy. For example, it may be the case that skilled narrators choose not to focus on accuracy when they perceive the narrative or recall task to involve fantasy and elaboration, as they may have in the present research, but they may have heightened accuracy when they perceive the task to be focused on reporting factually (see, e.g., Kulkofsky et al, 2011). Future research can address this question by testing the links between narrative skills and memory accuracy when children are given instructions to focus on fantasy versus accuracy.…”

“…In the present study, we tested the relation between narrative skills in European American and Chinese American school-aged children and the children's long-term memory for a staged event. We were particularly interested in studying children in the early school years given that at this point, children have internalized elements of parental conversational styles in their memory operations (e.g., Haden et al, 1997;Kulkofsky et al, 2011;Wang & Song, 2017). Children in this age group are also capable of retaining lengthy, detailed representations of past events for extended periods and are capable of later independently reporting that information in narrative form (Nelson & Fivush, 2004;.…”

How retellings shape younger and older adults' memories

“…When retellings are told to be accurate, entertaining goals are low. Conversely, when retellings are told to be entertaining, accuracy goals are low (Kulkofsky, 2007; as cited in Kulkofsky, Principe, Debaran, & Stouch, 2011). This trade-off may be important in real-world contexts where retellings often are told to be entertaining.…”