Autobiographical memory for prior events by children and adults

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This proposal focuses on memory (especially children's memory). One thrust of the proposed research is both children's and adults' inability to recall events from their very early life, i.e., the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. This is a very new field in child research, yet it has been studied for many years in adults. A series of studies will help answer questions like: Which of our early memories disappear, when, and why? What helps us keep memories? How well can we place the time those events occurred? And how does the maintenance/disappearance of memories from early life differ from later childhood memories? Questions like these engender considerable interest from the public as well as are important for our understanding of memory. A second focus is the relationship between stress and memory, i.e., how accurately we recall highly distressing events. This is an area of enormous forensic importance, and current research highlights an important paradox: as stress increases, adults' memory becomes considerably worse, but this is not true for children. Why this difference? We will explore a possible explanation: differences in methodology, especially the sorts of stressful events that are studied. Lastly we will look at children as eyewitnesses - again, a crucial issue for courts, police, lawyers, etc. An important issue that has received relatively little attention is the effect of parental coaching on the credibility of child reports. This will be explored in a series of studies looking at children who are telling the truth about salient stressful events versus are fabricating their stories, and half of the children will be coached by their parents to tell more convincing stories (both truthful ones and lies). Being able to identify when children are lying is a crucial issue forensically, and this research will help us understand the role parental coaching plays.