This project is concerned with the abilities of 3 to 7-year old children to remember personally-experienced events over extended delay intervals. The studies outlined examine children's long-term retention of the details of visits to the doctor for a regularly-scheduled physical examination, as well as three types of more stressful and less routine medical experiences: 1) an invasive radiological procedure involving urinary catheterization; 2) an emergency visit to a plastic surgeon for sutures; and 3) an initial appointment with a pediatric dentist. The proposed work stems from an informal framework that has been developed for exploring age differences in long-term retention. Of the 13 studies proposed, 11 are experiments that are designed to: a) examine factors such as prior knowledge, stress, and temperament that may be associated with the encoding and storage of personally-experienced events; b) investigate the extent to which intervening experiences during a long interval can affect memory representations and subsequent reports; and c) explore contextual variables that have the potential to affect the retrievability of stored information. An additional two studies involve interpretive activities that make use of an integrated across-study data base to evaluate the findings an explore a mathematical model for characterizing children's performance. This research should contribute to our understanding of the course of retention (and loss) of information about personally-experienced events over time and will also have implications for the management of children who provide testimony in the courts.
| Greenhoot, A F (2000) Remembering and understanding: the effects of changes in underlying knowledge on children's recollections. Child Dev 71:1309-28 |
| Michel, M K; Gordon, B N; Ornstein, P A et al. (2000) The abilities of children with mental retardation to remember personal experiences: implications for testimony. J Clin Child Psychol 29:453-63 |
| Ornstein, P A; Manning, E L; Pelphrey, K A (1999) Children's memory for pain. J Dev Behav Pediatr 20:262-77 |
| Ornstein, P A (1995) Children's long-term retention of salient personal experiences. J Trauma Stress 8:581-605 |
