Examining differences in the levels of false memories in children and adults using child-normed lists.

Abstract

Several previous studies have demonstrated that children, when compared with adults, exhibit both lower levels of veridical memory and fewer intrusions when given semantically associated lists. However, researchers have drawn these conclusions using semantically associated word lists that were normed with adults, which may not lead to the same level of activation or gist generation in children. In the current study, the authors used similar associative word lists normed with children and then evaluated the memory of children and adults using these newly normed lists as well as the typical adult-normed lists. Results indicate that children showed lower true and false memories with both the child-normed and adult-normed lists. Thus, these data suggest that the negative relationship between age and false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM; J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995) paradigm is not an artifact of the age group used to construct the lists.