Children with ADHD symptoms are less susceptible to gap-filling errors than typically developing children

Metacognitive Monitoring of Text Comprehension: An Investigation on Postdictive Judgments in Typically Developing Children and Children With Reading Comprehension Difficulties

The ability to assess and monitor one's own understanding of a written text is fundamental for learning and academic achievement. In the current paper, postdictive monitoring of text comprehension (i.e., the ability to judge the accuracy of responses previously given to a reading comprehension test) was investigated in both typically developing (TD) children and children with reading comprehension difficulties. Children from primary school (3rd to 5th grade) and secondary school (6th to 8th grade) participated in the study (N = 245). They were administered standardized tasks for reading comprehension, in which they had to read two texts and answer 12 multiple-choice questions after each text; subsequently, they had to provide postdictive judgments evaluating their performance: for each answer they had to select whether they judged it as correct, incorrect or whether they were uncertain. Two scores were calculated: Bias score, indicating the difference between metacognitive judgments of accuracy and actual performance; and Accurate estimation, indicating the sum of correct answers judged as "correct" and incorrect answers judged as "incorrect." Results showed that primary school children were more overconfident than secondary school children and made fewer Accurate estimations especially for "correct" responses. Furthermore, the consideration of a group of children with reading comprehension difficulties showed that these failures are linked to worse metacognitive monitoring ability of comprehension performance in comparison not only to age-matched controls but also to the TD group of third-graders. Implications for learning and achievement are discussed.

Emotional false memories in children with learning disabilities

Research has shown that children with learning disabilities (LD) are less prone to evince associative illusions of memory as a result of impairments in their ability to engage in semantic processing. However, it is unclear whether this observation is true for scripted life events, especially if they include emotional content, or across a broad spectrum of learning disabilities. The present study addressed these issues by assessing recognition memory for script-like information in children with nonverbal learning disability (NLD), children with dyslexia, and typically developing children (N=51). Participants viewed photographs about 8 common events (e.g., family dinner), and embedded in each episode was either a negative or a neutral consequence of an unseen action. Children's memory was then tested on a yes/no recognition task that included old and new photographs. Results showed that the three groups performed similarly in recognizing target photographs, but exhibited differences in memory errors. Compared to other groups, children with NLD were more likely to falsely recognize photographs that depicted an unseen cause of an emotional seen event and associated more "Remember" responses to these errors. Children with dyslexia were equally likely to falsely recognize both unseen causes of seen photographs and photographs generally consistent with the script, whereas the other participant groups were more likely to falsely recognize unseen causes rather than script-consistent distractors. Results are interpreted in terms of mechanisms underlying false memories' formation in different clinical populations of children with LD.

Developmental trends in different types of spontaneous false memories: implications for the legal field

In an emerging area of memory research, it is becoming apparent that one particular type of false memory, called spontaneous false memory, follows a developmental trajectory that is the opposite of what is commonly assumed in false memory research - that is, spontaneous false memories are more likely to occur in adults than in children. The present study focused on developmental trends of different types of spontaneous false memories. Specifically, in the current study, 6-8 year-olds, 10-12 year-olds, and adults were presented with two methods to induce spontaneous false memories: (i) semantically related word lists that are commonly used to evoke spontaneous false memories [i.e, Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm]; and (ii) a video in which related details were not shown but were presented during a recognition task. The results showed that children were more likely to form false memories than adults in the video false memory paradigm, whereas DRM false memories were more evident in adults than in children. Furthermore, we found that on a general level, DRM false memories were positively related to video spontaneous false memories. We explain that stimuli that contain obvious themes attenuate or even reverse developmental trends in spontaneous false memories.

Inferential false memories of events: negative consequences protect from distortions when the events are free from further elaboration

The present experiment was conducted to investigate whether negative emotionally charged and arousing content of to-be-remembered scripted material would affect propensity towards memory distortions. We further investigated whether elaboration of the studied material through free recall would affect the magnitude of memory errors. In this study participants saw eight scripts. Each of the scripts included an effect of an action, the cause of which was not presented. Effects were either negatively emotional or neutral. Participants were assigned to either a yes/no recognition test group (recognition), or to a recall and yes/no recognition test group (elaboration + recognition). Results showed that participants in the recognition group produced fewer memory errors in the emotional condition. Conversely, elaboration + recognition participants had lower accuracy and produced more emotional memory errors than the other group, suggesting a mediating role of semantic elaboration on the generation of false memories. The role of emotions and semantic elaboration on the generation of false memories is discussed.