Remembering what happened vs. remembering what it meant
An upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin will
include a review suggesting that the memories of children may be more reliable
– at least for evidential legal purposes – than the memories of adults.
The review conducted by Valerie Reyna and Chuck
Brainerd assesses over thirty studies sparked by their own earlier research on what they call the Fuzzy Trace Theory. According to that theory, people store
two different kinds of memory of experiences: memory of what happened (verbatim memory), and
memory of the meaning of what happened (gist memory). Reyna and Brainerd hypothesised that
children rely more on the former, and adults rely more on the later, and they presented results indicating that this makes adults more prone to certain sorts of ‘false
memory’, since what an event meant to someone may be inconsistent with what
actually happened. In the upcoming review, Reyna and Brainerd will claim that the slough of publications triggered
by their initial research backs up these hypotheses.
would follow?
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