Knowing about not remembering: developmental dissociations in lack‐of‐memory monitoring
Ghetti, Simona Castelli, Paola Lyons, Kristen E.
Ghetti, Simona
Lyons, Kristen E.
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
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.
Description
Date
2010
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Memory absence monitoring, Episodic memory development, Familiarity-based processing
Citation
Ghetti, Simona, Paola Castelli, and Kristen E. Lyons. “Knowing about Not Remembering: Developmental Dissociations in Lack-of-Memory Monitoring.” Developmental Science 13 (4): 611–21. 2010.