2009/08/12 by Simona Ghetti, M. Paola Castelli, Kristen E. Lyons · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Childhood memory #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Developmental psychology #Episodic memory #False memory #Memoria #Memory Processes and Influences #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Memory errors #Metacognition #Metamemory #Neuroscience #Psychology #Recall #Recognition memory
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00908.x
openalex publication_date 2009/08/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/22
Children aged 7 and younger encounter great difficulty in assessing whether lack of memory for an event indicates that the event was not experienced. The present research investigated whether this difficulty results from a general inability to evaluate memory absence or from a specific inability to monitor one feature of memory absence that has been examined in previous studies, namely expected memorability. Seven-, 8- and 9-year-olds, and adults (N = 72) enacted, imagined and confabulated about bizarre and common actions. Two weeks later, participants were asked to recognize the actions that had been enacted. Even 7-year-olds monitored the relative familiarity of rejected distracters (i.e. reported higher confidence for the rejection of novel versus imagined and confabulated distracters). However, only older children and adults exhibited the ability to monitor expected memorability (e.g. reported higher confidence for the rejection of bizarre versus common distracters). These results suggest that young children exhibit specific, rather than general, deficits in monitoring memory absence, and provide an indication of the specific domains in which lack-of-memory monitoring improves during childhood.