Kristen E. Lyons

The Development of Uncertainty Monitoring in Early Childhood

This study examined the development of uncertainty monitoring in early childhood. Specifically, this study tested the prediction that preschoolers can reflect on their sense of certainty about the likely accuracy of their decisions, and it examined whether this ability differs across domains. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 74) completed a perceptual identification and a lexical identification task in which they reported whether they were certain or uncertain about their answers. Results showed that even 3-year-olds provided confidence judgments that discriminated accurate from inaccurate responses, but this discrimination increased with age. Furthermore, results suggest that 3-year-olds primarily rely on response latency to assess certainty, whereas older preschoolers do not. Overall, these findings suggest that uncertainty monitoring emerges and develops during the preschool years.

The development of metamemory monitoring during retrieval: the case of memory strength and memory absence.

This research examined the development of the ability to monitor memory strength and memory absence at retrieval. In two experiments, 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults enacted and imagined enacting a series of bizarre and common actions. Two weeks later, they completed a memory test in which they were asked to determine whether each action had been enacted, had been imagined, or was novel and to provide a confidence judgment for each response. Results showed that participants across age groups successfully monitored differences in strength between memories for enacted actions and memories for imagined actions. However, compared with 10-year-olds and adults, 7-year-olds exhibited deficits in monitoring of differences in memory strength among imagined actions as well as deficits in monitoring memory absence. Results underscore metamemory developments that have important implications for memory accuracy.

Age differences in the contribution of recollection and familiarity to false-memory formation: a new paradigm to examine developmental reversals

Using a new method for studying the development of false-memory formation, we examined developmental differences in the rates at which 6-, 7-, 9-, 10-, and 18-year-olds made two types of memory errors: backward causal-inference errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed the non-viewed cause of a previously viewed effect), and gap-filling errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed a script-consistent event that was not actually witnessed). Previous research suggests that backward causal-inference errors are supported by recollection, whereas gap-filling errors are supported by familiarity. We hypothesized that age differences in these errors would parallel the developmental trajectories of these processes. As predicted, age-related increases in backward causal-inference errors were observed, while gap-filling errors were age-invariant, suggesting that recollection-based memory distortions increase with age while familiarity-based memory distortions are relatively stable from middle childhood through adulthood.

Heralding the Authoritarian? Orientation Toward Authority in Early Childhood

In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based “adult = reliable” heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents’ authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children’s trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents’ orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

Knowing about not remembering: developmental dissociations in lack-of-memory monitoring

Children aged 7 and younger encounter great difficulty in assessing whether lack of memory for an event indicates that the event was not experienced. The present research investigated whether this difficulty results from a general inability to evaluate memory absence or from a specific inability to monitor one feature of memory absence that has been examined in previous studies, namely expected memorability. Seven-, 8- and 9-year-olds, and adults (N = 72) enacted, imagined and confabulated about bizarre and common actions. Two weeks later, participants were asked to recognize the actions that had been enacted. Even 7-year-olds monitored the relative familiarity of rejected distracters (i.e. reported higher confidence for the rejection of novel versus imagined and confabulated distracters). However, only older children and adults exhibited the ability to monitor expected memorability (e.g. reported higher confidence for the rejection of bizarre versus common distracters). These results suggest that young children exhibit specific, rather than general, deficits in monitoring memory absence, and provide an indication of the specific domains in which lack-of-memory monitoring improves during childhood.