Fuzzy-trace theory and children's false memories

Fuzzy-trace theory's concepts of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, a nd similarity judgment provide a unified account of the false-memory phenom ena that have been most commonly studied in children: false-recognition eff ects and misinformation effects. False-recognition effects (elevated false- alarm rates for unpresented distracters that preserve the meanings of prese nted targets) are due to increased rates of similarity or false identity ju dgment about distracters or to decreased rates of nonidentity judgment. Mis information effects (erroneous acceptance of misleading postevent informati on and erroneous rejection of actual events) are also due to variability in rates of similarity, identity, and nonidentity judgment. Two experimental paradigms are presented, one for false recognition (conjoint recognition) a nd one for misinformation (conjoint misinformation), that allow investigato rs to tease apart the contributions of these processes to children's false- memory reports. Each paradigm is implemented in a mathematical model that p rovides numerical estimates of the processes. (C) 1998 Academic Press.