MISLEADING CHILDRENS STORY RECALL - FORGETTING AND REMINISCENCE OF THE FACTS

Reasons for the transient nature of misinformation effects in children's long-term recollection are discussed. Two of the key issues are initial encoding confounds and analytical insensitivity. A recently developed model of long-term retention that eliminates these problems is outlined and used to analyze the data from two experiments on children's (kindergarten and Grade 2) story recall. The main results show that (a) misinformation effects were small in magnitude and were directly related to rate of forgetting, not age, (b) developmental differences in retention were controlled by forgetting, particularly storage failures, and (c) reminiscence occurred across test trials and increased the probability of correct factual recall. These results clearly demonstrate that when initial encoding is controlled and appropriate measurement techniques are in place, age and misinformation effects are independent.