Dewhurst, S. A. & Robinson, C. A. (2004). False memories in children: Evidence for a
shift from phonological to semantic associations. Psychological
Science, 15, 782-786.
Roediger and McDermott explained the
false memories created through their DRM paradigm in terms of the
implicit-associative-responses hypothesis, which states that participants
generate words related to the study words.
At test, participants often retrieve these items and falsely believe
they were presented at study instead of internally generated.
Several individual differences have been found to
influence susceptibility to the DRM effect.
Adults with dementia have more false memories than healthy adults of the
same age. Damage to certain areas of the
brain seem to increase susceptibility. Women who have recovered memories of sexual
abuse also seem more vulnerable to the effect.
Children seem to show much less of an effect. Recent research has shown that children
recall (and falsely recognize) more phonologically related words than
semantically related words. This study
sought to investigate whether children are in fact susceptible to the DRM
effect when the false memories are based on phonology. The authors predicted that the type of false
memories would change with age, with younger children falsely remembering
phonologically related words, and older children falsely endorsing more
semantically related words.
5, 8, and 11 year olds were presented with five
lists of eight words each. Each word in
the list was semantically related to one of the five themes, and each had at
least one rhyme. All words were familiar
to children. The experimenter read the
words aloud to the children, who recalled all words they could remember after
each list.
Correct recall increased with age, with 11 year
olds recalling more than 8 year olds, who recalled more than 5 year olds. There were false memories in all age groups,
but the type of errors differed. 8 year
olds made more intrusions than the 5 and 11 year olds. Overall, semantic errors were recalled most
often and unrelated words were recalled least.
5 year olds falsely recalled significantly more phonological errors than
unrelated or semantic words, which did not differ from each other. The type of errors did not significantly
differ from each other in the 8 year old group.
11 year olds made significantly more semantic errors than unrelated or
phonologically related errors. Between
group comparisons showed that both the 5 and 8 year olds made significantly
more phonological errors than the 11 year olds, who made more semantic errors
than the 5 year olds.
These results support the idea that a
developmental shift from phonological to semantic processing occurs in
childhood. Brainerd’s fuzzy-trace theory
can account for these results, as can the implicit-associative-responses
hypothesis. Fuzzy-trace theory suggests
that younger children cannot extract gist from word lists, which would be why
the younger children make more phonological errors than semantic (gist related)
errors. Children could also produce
phonologically related words internally, especially since the acoustic
attributes of the words were emphasized because the lists were read aloud. They might then confuse the source of the
phonologically related words, which supports the associative-responses
hypothesis.
The authors suggest that the different
performance of the 8 year old group could be attributed to utilization
deficiency. This group might be in a
transitional stage in which they are learning to use strategies to remember the
words. Because using a strategy is new,
it might consume most of their attention and actually lower their ability to
learn the words. To compensate for this,
the children might have lowered the threshold for endorsing a word as studied,
which caused the three types of errors to fail to significantly differ from
each other.