Memory for an observed event in the presence of prior misinformation: Developmental patterns of free recall and identification accuracy

The present study compared developmental patterns of children's and adults' abilities to give a free narrative of a videotaped event and to identify t he persons involved from a set of faces and explored consistency of perform ance across the two tasks. A total of 284 participants from four age groups (6-, 8- and 10-year-old children, and adults) were included. The results r evealed that on the one hand, free reports of an event showed a steady impr ovement during childhood. On the other hand, children aged 6 years and up w ere proficient at recognizing faces they had seen in the film: there were n o age-related increases in face identification competencies in terms of hit s or discrimination index. The presentation of misleading faces between enc oding and retrieval led to more false alarms and fewer hits, regardless of age. Adults were more conservative than children in their selection of face s, and thus, their number of correct hits was exceeded by children. However , adults outperformed children on face identification in terms of providing more correct rejections. Consistency of performance across verbal recall a nd face recognition abilities was only significant in the group of 10-year- olds.