ABSTRACT

The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children’s (11 to 12 years of age) and adults’ spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of the false memory effect and a demonstration of a DRM word list and an associated recognition task. It was hypothesized that children would have fewer false memories than adults using the DRM paradigm and that forewarning would reduce the number of critical lures remembered by children and adults. We found a developmental reversal effect in that children had lower false memory levels than adults and that forewarning reduced, but did not eliminate, false memory propensity in both children and adults. Our findings further indicated that forewarning was more effective in reducing false memory levels in 11- to 12-year-old children than in adults. Finally, analyses revealed that participants were more accurate when they received a forewarning as compared to when they did not.

摘要

目前的实验通过向参与者展示经常用于引发错误记忆的语义相关单词列表（即 Deese-Roediger-McDermott（ DRM）范式）。预警包括对错误记忆效应的解释以及 DRM 单词列表和相关识别任务的演示。据推测，使用 DRM 范式，儿童的错误记忆比成年人少，并且预警会减少儿童和成人记住的关键诱饵的数量。我们发现了一种发育逆转效应，即儿童的错误记忆水平低于成人，并且预警减少但并未消除儿童和成人的错误记忆倾向。我们的研究结果进一步表明，预警在降低 11 至 12 岁儿童的错误记忆水平方面比成人更有效。最后，分析显示，参与者在收到预警时比没有收到预警时更准确。