Fuzzy-trace theory and children's false memories. Review uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Fuzzy-trace theory's concepts of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment provide a unified account of the false-memory phenomena that have been most commonly studied in children: false-recognition effects and misinformation effects. False-recognition effects (elevated false-alarm rates for unpresented distractors that preserve the meanings of presented targets) are due to increased rates of similarity or false identity judgment about distractors or to decreased rates of nonidentity judgment. Misinformation effects (erroneous acceptance of misleading postevent information and erroneous rejection of actual events) are also due to variability in rates of similarity, identity, and nonidentity judgment. Two experimental paradigms are presented, one for false recognition (conjoint recognition) and one for misinformation (conjoint misinformation), that allow investigators to tease apart the contributions of these processes to children's false-memory reports. Each paradigm is implemented in a mathematical model that provides numerical estimates of the processes.

publication date

  • November 1, 1998

Research

keywords

  • Judgment
  • Memory

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0032198550

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1006/jecp.1998.2464

PubMed ID

  • 9843617

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 71

issue

  • 2