There has been an increase in the amount of research done in the past few years on children’s false memory. This is mainly due to the controversy over the use of children as eyewitnesses in trial. It is suggested that children are more vulnerable to false memory because the verbatim memory for their lives is poor. The same type of phenomenon has been noted in studies on gist memory as well.

Some theories predict that there could be some areas of false memory that increase with development. The Fuzzy-trace theory’s dual-process of analysis is one of those. This theory assumes that children store dissociated representations of both verbatim and gist experiences. Their later recounts are a combination of the two. This theory suggests that the older a child gets the more chance they have of falsely remembering something. There are two conditions that must be met in order for this theory to be correct. 1) Reports must depend of gist memory, which develops more with age and 2) Natural verbatim memory must be unable to neutralize natural gist memory by providing actual experiences to combat false memories.

Other research still states that verbatim ability increases with age. When concerning gist memory, other research states that young children sometimes fail to make the connection of certain meanings to certain experiences and have limitations when it comes to linking events together by a specific trait. The fuzzy trace theory suggests that false reports will increase with age due to familiar gist experiences (mainly those connected across several events) not being neutralized by actual events in the verbatim memory.

During this study Brainerd, Reyna, and Forrest used the DRM paradigm in three experiments to test whether reduced susceptibility to the DRM illusion could be confirmed in young children and the extent to which there are qualitative differences in the DRM illusion between adults and children.

Experiment 1 used 60 kindergarten participants from middle-class, residential areas. The experimenters used 24 word lists created by Deese, Roediger, and McDermott. The critical unrepresented words in each of these lists were words that were functional in a young child’s vocabulary. The participants were told to listen carefully to a list of "vocabulary words". They were told that they should pay attention and try to remember as many as they could because they would be given a memory test later. Individual children studied and recalled 10 lists chosen at random. They would hear and audio tape of List 1 and immediately given one minute of oral free recall. Then they were instructed to remember as many words as they could. When they stopped, they were encouraged to try and remember any more. This procedure was immediately repeated with Lists 2-10. The instructor circled the correct responses and wrote down the incorrect responses.

There were four types of data collected in this experiment. 1) Recall of studied words, 2) Intrusions of critical unrepresented words, 3) Intrusions of unrepresented words with similar meanings and, 4) Intrusions of words that appeared on earlier lists. The most dramatic finding of this experiment was that 5 year olds were not susceptible to the DRM illusion. Intrusions of critical words only showed up in 6% of the lists as opposed to roughly 50% of the lists in adult studies. Critical word intrusions in adults were much higher than the other types of intrusions combined. It was rare, in adults, to find intrusions due to previously studied lists. The Fuzzy-trace theory suggest that these data are a result of adults connection the concepts of the lists or "getting the gist" with more success than children. Children seemed to have a more difficult time with intrusions from words from previous lists. This suggests that they did not "get the gist"

Experiment 2 used 50 kindergarten children and 50 second-grade children from middle-class residential areas. The procedure followed in this experiment was the same except for the lists used. There were 16 lists from the Stadler et. al. norms. 8 lists were lists that produced the highest level of false recall and 8 lists were lists that produced the lowest level of false recall.

The same four variables were measured in this study against the kindergarteners and against the second graders. There were three major results. 1) Age increase in recall was reliable for true recall but not false, 2) True recall was higher than false in both age groups, and 3) True recall of low lists was higher than true recall of high lists, but there was no difference in false recall. There are three important findings in these results. 1) Once gain the level of false recall for critical unrepresented words was near floor level (7%) 2) High lists did not increase false recall in children but the same lists increase it by three-fold in adults, and 3) High lists produced less true recall in 5-7 year olds, but in adults the amount of true recall was the same for both types. Once again the children in the study failed to "get the gist" if the lists having unrepresented critical words as the lowest form of intrusion.

Experiment 3 had three main goals 1) Determine whether there will be an increase in false memory by age 11, 2) To measure children’s false recognition of critical unrepresented words, and 3) To directly compare levels of false recognition in children with that of adults. Experiment 3 used 40 kindergarten participants and 42 sixth-grade participants from middle-class, residential areas. The same procedure of Experiment 2 was used with the exception of a post study manipulation after the recall test has been given. This consisted of hearing half of the lists and giving the participants one minute of oral free recall and after the second half giving the participants a non-memorial activity. After the 16 lists were presented a Y/N recognition test was given. A list of words was read aloud and the children answered yes if it was on the list and no if it was a new word.

The same four responses were measured for recall. The following findings were encountered 1) Evidence of developmental increases in false recall occurred in between early childhood and early adolescence and also between early adolescence and young adulthood, 2) Developmental increases were greater for true recall than for false between childhood and adolescence and between adolescence and adulthood, 3) True recall was greater than false recall for high and low lists for all groups though it was significantly lower in adults, and 4) High and low lists had no affect on false recall in children but increased false recall for high lists in adults. Once again it is seen that children did not "get the gist" of the lists, however, adolescent’s false recalled resembled that of adult’s more so than the children’s. There were still three prominent differences 1) the percentage of high lists that produce false recall for critical unrepresented words was far less than that of adults, 2) the difference between intrusion rates for critical words and other similar-meaning words was much smaller than adults, and 3) the difference between high and low lists was much smaller than that of adults.

In recognition there were several findings as well. 1) true recognition increases with age between childhood and adolescence and between adolescence and adulthood, 2) False recognition of critical distracters increases in the same fashion between children and adolescents, but not between adolescents and adulthood and, 3) false recognition of semantically related distracters increases with age, though, less so between childhood and adolescence.

This study shows that young children are not susceptible to the DRM illusion. The theory states that this is caused by a young child’s inability to store gist memory of meanings. The results of this study could have been caused by two factors 1) A child’s inability to understand the meaning of some of the words in the DRM lists or 2) a child’s inability to make connections of shared meanings. After this study was done two other articles with the same subject matter were found. One of the studies found results similar to the results found in this study and one did not.