The tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth: how belief in the Tooth Fairy can engender false memories

Abstract

To examine how children's fantasy beliefs can affect memory for their experiences, 5-and 6-year-olds with differing levels of belief in the reality of the Tooth Fairy were prompted to recall their most recent primary tooth loss in either a truthful or fun manner. Many of the children who fully believed in the existence of the Tooth Fairy reported supernatural experiences consistent with the myth under both sets of recall instructions, whereas those who realized the fictionality of the myth recalled mainly realistic experiences. However, those children with equivocal beliefs evidenced a different pattern under each set of instructions, recalling mainly realistic experiences when asked to be truthful and reporting many fantastical experiences when prompted to relate the tooth loss in a fun manner. These findings suggest that children's beliefs in the reality of fantastic phenomena can give rise to genuine constructive memory errors in line with their fantasies.

Sentence contexts and cloze probabilities for Brazilian Portuguese children and adolescents

“…Vocabulary size and vocabulary complexity are significantly increased with age [ 50 – 53 ]. Thus, the older participants are expected to use more refined words to fit the semantic context of a sentence [ 34 , 54 , 55 ], whereas children are expected to choose words reflecting more general representations, as suggested by our findings.…”

Children’s natural conversations following exposure to a rumor: Linkages to later false reports

“…First, judges and juries are known to take agreement among witnesses as an index of accuracy (e.g., Duggan, Aubrey, Doherty, Isquith, Levine, Scheiner, 1989). The current work not only demonstrates that this assumption is unwarranted when false rumors have circulated among peers (see also Principe et al, 2007; Principe, Daley, et al, 2010) but also shows how natural conversations following exposure to rumor can lead to corroboration even when none of the witnesses are accurate. Second, based on findings that information repeated across interviews tends to highly accurate (e.g., Peterson, Moores, & White, 2001), consistency across interviews is often considered diagnostic of truthfulness.…”

Revisiting the Fantasy–Reality Distinction: Children as Naïve Skeptics

“…Research also identifies an initial resistance to the existence of novel entities, and a shift with development first toward increasing acceptance and then, in many cases, returning later to a skeptical view. Level of belief in novel beings appears to form an inverted U-shaped developmental pattern rather than the traditional pattern of a linear decrease with age common in discussions of belief in cultural fantasy figures such as Santa Claus (e.g., Prentice & Gordon, 1986) and the Tooth Fairy (Principe & Smith, 2008a, 2008b. In Woolley et al (2004), for example, children were introduced in their preschool to a novel fantastical being, the Candy Witch.…”

“…Yet, children do still make particularly salient mistakes about reality status. Confirming the experience of most parents in the United States, experimental work with young children reveals high levels of belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and various other fantastical beings (Clark, 1995;Prentice & Gordon, 1986;Prentice, Manosevitz, & Hubbs, 1978;Principe & Smith, 2008a, 2008bRosengren & Hickling, 1994;Sharon & Woolley, 2004). Research also shows that, given the right combination of age, evidence, and testimony, children will come to believe in a completely novel fantastical being (Boerger, Tullos, & Woolley, 2009;Woolley, Boerger, & Markman, 2004).…”