What factors underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories? Investigating the roles of language skills and auditory short-term memory

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the cognitive skills that underlie children's susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In Experiment 1, performance on the Verbal Similarities subtest of the British Ability Scales (BAS) II (Elliott, Smith, & McCulloch, 1997) predicted correct and false recall of semantic lures. In Experiment 2, performance on the Yopp-Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation (Yopp, 1988) did not predict correct recall, but inversely predicted the false recall of phonological lures. Auditory short-term memory was a negative predictor of false recall in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. The findings are discussed in terms of the formation of gist and verbatim traces as proposed by fuzzy trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1998) and the increasing automaticity of associations as proposed by associative activation theory (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009).

How reasoning, judgment, and decision making are colored by gist-based intuition: A fuzzy-trace theory approach.

“…Studies have also shown that third variables, such as sleep, which foment gist-based false memories, also foment intuitive reasoning and problem solving (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg, & Kensinger, 2008). Individual differences (e.g., in intelligence) also provide indirect links between memory, on the one hand, and reasoning and decision making, on the other hand; for example, higher intelligence has been linked with higher levels of gist-based false memory (McGeown, Gray, Robinson, & Dewhurst, 2014; Reyna, Holliday, & Marche, 2002; Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008; but see Stanovich & West, 2008). However, there has been no direct evidence that false memory was directly associated within-subjects to gist-based judgment-and-decision-making biases.…”

Dual processes of false recognition in kindergarten children and elementary school pupils

“…Apparently, the activation of critical items benefits from repeated list presentation even in kindergarten children, at least when age-specific DRM lists are used. The impact of presentation frequency corresponds with previous findings concerning the dependence of false memories from the activation of critical items in children (e.g., Del Prete et al, 2014;McGeown, Gray, Robinson, & Dewhurst, 2014;Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008;Wimmer & Howe, 2009). We assume that this activation would not benefit from list repetition when lists do not match the semantic knowledge of young children because previous findings indicate that kindergarten children do not tend to spontaneously extract gist information from DRM lists (Brainerd et al, 2011).…”

Phonological processes triggered by means of verbs conjugation

“…The work used one instrument of data collection being it 'unobtrusive measure'. Unobtrusive measures, however, involve he use of non-reactive sources, independent of the presence of the researcher, and include documentary evidence, physical evidence, and archive analysis (McGeown et al, 2014). Thus, for the current study, the work used a documentary systematic review sometimes referred as 'secondary data (Webb et al, 2000).…”