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Knowing about not remembering: developmental dissociations in lack‐of‐memory monitoring
Author(s) -
Ghetti Simona,
Castelli Paola,
Lyons Kristen E.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00908.x
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , metamemory , cognitive psychology , cognition , memoria , false memory , recognition memory , memory errors , childhood memory , episodic memory , metacognition , recall , neuroscience
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.