Processes That Control Children's False-Memory Reports: Recollection, Rejection, and Phantom Recollection

该项目延续了研究人员对儿童错误记忆的研究计划。这个研究项目是由理论驱动的，到目前为止，它已经就错误记忆产生了许多新的发现，这些发现最初是基于理论基础预测的。该项目包括三个大规模的发展实验。这些实验集中在两个认知操作上，它们被认为是儿童错误记忆报告的关键控制因素：回忆拒绝和幻影回忆。这两种操作的存在都是通过研究人员对错误记忆的理论描述(即模糊踪迹理论)来预测的，而且先前的实验已经报道了成年人使用这两种操作的证据。回忆拒绝是一种操作，它抑制对与儿童经验的主旨一致的虚假事件的报道。抑制是通过检测错误但与事实一致的事件和实际事件的逐字痕迹之间的不匹配来实现的。例如，当孩子们听到一个包含“鸟在笼子里”和“笼子在桌子下面”这两个句子的叙述后，孩子们可以通过逐字逐句地检索其中一个句子的痕迹，并注意到“鸟”和“桌子”这两个词没有出现在句子中，从而拒绝接受“鸟在桌子下面”这一未陈述的陈述。另一方面，幻影回忆是一种操作，它通过为虚假事件生成虚幻的生动现象来支持对与儿童经验要点一致的虚假事件的报道。模糊痕迹理论认为，主旨记忆有时会导致虚假事件伴随着虚幻的生动现象，这些现象很难与伴随真实事件的生动现象区分开来。这些幻觉记忆导致没有经历过的事情被记住为物理的“发生”(例如，它们是在头脑的眼睛里看到的，或者在头脑的耳朵里听到的)。模糊轨迹理论认为，当满足两个条件时，幻觉回忆就会发生：(A)经历过的事件反复提示某种熟悉的含义，因此对该含义的主旨记忆非常强烈；(B)引发幻象回忆的虚假事件是特别好的回忆线索。这些实验实现了一种新的范式--联合识别。该范式为测量儿童的回忆、拒绝和幻觉回忆提供了可靠的行为方法。儿童在三种类型的指令下对记忆测试做出反应(只接受有经验的事件，只接受与经验的主旨一致的非经验的事件，接受与经验的主旨一致的经验事件+非经验的事件)。回忆拒绝和幻觉回忆在这些不同类型的指令中具有不同的反应模式。一个定义在范式之上的数学模型修正了外部变量对原始反应模式的影响，这使得研究人员能够分离和量化回忆拒绝和幻觉回忆的影响。这一范式的实施产生了关于回忆拒绝和幻觉回忆如何影响错误记忆报告的详细发现，这些操作如何随着年龄的变化而变化，以及它们对具有取证意义的任务变量的反应。实验一考察了回忆拒绝和幻影回忆对幼儿(4岁和5岁)、大龄儿童(10岁和11岁)和成人自发虚假记忆的影响。实验1还确定了这两个操作对五个具有取证意义的任务变量(事件的重复、事件的新近、内存测试的顺序、内存测试的时间和内存测试的重复)的反应。模糊轨迹理论对这些变量中的每一个变量对回忆、拒绝和幻觉回忆的影响进行了预测。在实验2中，通过在叙事呈现后插入记忆-暗示程序，在相同的三个年龄水平上考察了回忆拒绝和幻影回忆对植入的错误记忆的影响。实验2包括与实验1相同的五个任务变量。实验3的目的是确定实验1和实验2的结果在多大程度上适用于更自然的目击情景。叙述性的虚假记忆程序被涉及轻罪盗窃的标准化准法医任务所取代。本研究采用目击者实验方法，考察了回忆拒绝和幻觉回忆对自发错误记忆和植入错误记忆的影响。研究人员对相同的三个年龄水平进行了研究，设计包括实验1和实验2中所示的五个任务变量中的三个(事件重复、记忆测试的时间和记忆测试的重复)。

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).