Abstract The current study compared older children’s (11/12-year-olds) and adolescents’ (14/15-year-olds) vulnerability to false memory creation using two different methods (i.e., the Deese/Roediger-McDermott [DRM] and memory conformity paradigms) involving neutral and negative stimuli. In line with previous research, a developmental reversal effect was found for the DRM paradigm, which means that when employing this method children displayed lower false memory levels than adolescents. However, when using the memory conformity paradigm, the opposite pattern was found, with adolescents forming fewer false memories than children. This indicates that in a co-witness context, adolescents are less prone to memory errors than children. The emotional valence of the stimuli used in both paradigms did not notably affect the production of false memories. There was no statistically significant correlation between false memories as measured by the DRM and the memory conformity paradigms. Altogether, the current study indicates that there is no single type of false memory as different experimental paradigms evoke different types of erroneous recollections. Additionally, our study corroborates past findings in the literature concerning the issue of developmental reversal, strengthening the idea that under certain circumstances children might indeed be better witnesses than adolescents.

中文翻译：

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儿童是不是比青少年更好的见证人？不同错误记忆范式的发展趋势

摘要 当前的研究使用两种不同的方法（即 Deese/Roediger-McDermott [DRM] 和记忆整合范式）涉及中性和负面刺激。与之前的研究一致，发现 DRM 范式的发展逆转效应，这意味着当采用这种方法时，儿童的错误记忆水平低于青少年。然而，当使用记忆整合范式时，发现了相反的模式，青少年形成的错误记忆少于儿童。这表明在共同见证的情况下，青少年比儿童更不容易出现记忆错误。两种范式中使用的刺激的情绪效价并没有显着影响错误记忆的产生。由 DRM 测量的错误记忆与记忆整合范式之间没有统计学上的显着相关性。总之，目前的研究表明，不存在单一类型的错误记忆，因为不同的实验范式会引起不同类型的错误回忆。此外，我们的研究证实了过去有关发展逆转问题的文献研究结果，强化了在某些情况下儿童确实可能比青少年更好的证人的观点。