Autobiographical memory for prior events by children and adults

这项建议侧重于记忆(特别是儿童的记忆)。这项拟议的研究的一个重点是儿童和成年人都无法回忆起他们很早就发生的事情，即儿童健忘症现象。这在儿童研究中是一个非常新的领域，但在成人身上已经研究了很多年。一系列研究将有助于回答这样的问题：我们早期的哪些记忆消失了，什么时候消失的，为什么消失的？是什么帮助我们保持记忆？我们能准确地确定这些事件发生的时间吗？早期记忆的维持/消失与童年后期的记忆有何不同？这样的问题引起了公众的极大兴趣，对我们理解记忆也很重要。第二个关注点是压力和记忆之间的关系，也就是我们回忆非常痛苦的事件的准确性。这是一个极具法医学意义的领域，目前的研究突出了一个重要的悖论：随着压力的增加，成年人的记忆力会变得相当糟糕，但对儿童来说并非如此。为什么会有这样的差异？我们将探索一种可能的解释：方法上的差异，特别是所研究的压力事件的种类。最后，我们将把儿童视为目击者--对于法院、警察、律师等来说，这也是一个至关重要的问题。一个相对较少受到关注的重要问题是，父母指导对儿童报告可信度的影响。这一点将在一系列研究中得到探索，研究对象是那些对突出的压力事件说真话的孩子，而不是编造故事的孩子，其中一半的孩子将在父母的指导下讲出更有说服力的故事(包括真实故事和谎言)。从法医学角度看，能够识别孩子撒谎是一个至关重要的问题，这项研究将帮助我们理解父母指导所起的作用。

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.