This project continues the researchers' program of research on children's false memories. That program of research is theory-driven, and to date, it has produced a number of new findings about false memories that were originally predicted on theoretical grounds. This project consists of three large-scale developmental experiments. The experiments focus on two cognitive operations that are believed to be key controlling factors in children's false-memory reports: recollection rejection and phantom recollection. The existence of both operations is predicted by the researchers' theoretical account of false memory (i.e., fuzzy-trace theory), and evidence of the use of both operations by adults has been reported in previous experiments. Recollection rejection is an operation that suppresses the reporting of false events that are consistent with the gist of children's experience. Suppression is accomplished via the detection of mismatches between false-but-gist-consistent events and verbatim traces of actual events. For instance, after hearing a narrative containing the statement "The bird is inside the cage" and "The cage is under the table," children could reject the unpresented statement "The bird is under the table" by retrieving verbatim traces of either presented sentence and noticing that the words "bird" and "table" do not appear together in the sentence. Phantom recollection, on the other hand, is an operation that supports the reporting of false events that are consistent with the gist of children's experience by generating illusory vivid phenomenologies for those events. Fuzzy-trace theory posits that gist memories sometimes cause false events to be accompanied by illusory vivid phenomenologies that are difficult to distinguish from the vivid phenomenologies that accompany true events. These phantom recollections cause things that were not experienced to be remembered as physical "occurrences" (e.g, they are seen in the mind's eye or heard in the mind's ear). Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that phantom recollection can occur when two conditions are met: (a) Experienced events repeatedly cue some familiar meaning, so that gist memories of that meaning are very strong, and (b) the false events that provoke phantom recollection are especially good retrieval cues for strong gist memories.
The experiments implement a new paradigm, conjoint recognition. This paradigm provides a reliable behavioral method of measuring recollection rejection and phantom recollection in children. Children respond to memory tests under three types of instructions (accept only experienced events, accept only nonexperienced events that are consistent with the gist of experience, and accept experienced events + nonexperienced events that are consistent with the gist of experience). Recollection rejection and phantom recollection are identified with distinct patterns of responses across these different types of instructions. A mathematical model that is defined over the paradigm corrects raw response patterns for the influence of extraneous variables, which allows researchers to separate and quantify the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection. Implementation of this paradigm generates detailed findings on how recollection rejection and phantom recollection affect false-memory reports, on how these operations change with age, and on how they react to forensically-significant task variables. In Experiment 1, the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on spontaneous false memories of narratives are studied in younger children (4- and 5-year-olds), older children (10- and 11-year-olds), and adults. Experiment 1 also determines how the two operations react to five forensically-significant task variables (repetition of events, recency of events, order of memory tests, timing of memory tests, and repetition of memory tests). Fuzzy-trace theory makes predictions about each of these variable's effects on recollection rejection and phantom recollection. In Experiment 2, the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on implanted false memories of narratives are studied at the same three age levels by interpolating a memory-suggestion procedure following narrative presentation. Experiment 2 includes the same five task variables as Experiment 1. The aim of Experiment 3 is to determine how well the results of Experiments 1 and 2 generalize to more naturalistic eyewitness situations. The narrative false-memory procedure is replaced by a standardized quasi-forensic task involving a misdemeanor theft. The effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on both spontaneous and implanted false memories are assessed with this eyewitness procedure. The same three age levels are studied, and the design includes three of the five task variables that figure in Experiments 1 and 2 (repetition of events, timing of memory tests, and repetition of memory tests).
