AUTOSUGGESTIBILITY IN MEMORY DEVELOPMENT

Autosuggestibility is a potentially common source of false memories in children. We studied a form of autosuggestibility in which children's answers to memory tests were shifted in the direction of their illogi cal solutions to reasoning problems. In Experiments 1 and 2, illogic-c onsistent shifts were identified in children's memories of the numeric al inputs on class-inclusion problems. The magnitudes of the shifts de clined with age, and they appeared to be due to the intrusion of inapp ropriate gist on memory probes rather than retroactive interference fr om illogical reasoning. A model of how gist intrusion causes autosugge stibility was investigated in Experiments 3-5. The model assumes that children retrieve and process inappropriate gist when memory tests sup ply cues that are inadequate to permit access to verbatim memories. (C ) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.