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Memory for an observed event in the presence of prior misinformation: Developmental patterns of free recall and identification accuracy 1
Author(s) -
Roebers Claudia M.,
Schneider Wolfgang
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1348/026151001166227
Subject(s) - psychology , recall , developmental psychology , free recall , misinformation , consistency (knowledge bases) , identification (biology) , set (abstract data type) , cognitive psychology , law , botany , geometry , mathematics , political science , computer science , biology , programming language
The present study compared developmental patterns of children's and adults' abilities to give a free narrative of a videotaped event and to identify the persons involved from a set of faces and explored consistency of performance across the two tasks. A total of 284 participants from four age groups (6‐, 8‐ and 10‐year‐old children, and adults) were included. The results revealed that on the one hand, free reports of an event showed a steady improvement during childhood. On the other hand, children aged 6 years and up were proficient at recognizing faces they had seen in the film: there were no age‐related increases in face identification competencies in terms of hits or discrimination index. The presentation of misleading faces between encoding and retrieval led to more false alarms and fewer hits, regardless of age. Adults were more conservative than children in their selection of faces, and thus, their number of correct hits was exceeded by children. However, adults outperformed children on face identification in terms of providing more correct rejections. Consistency of performance across verbal recall and face recognition abilities was only significant in the group of 10‐year‐olds.