Young Children's Updating and Recall of Impressions: Effects of Informativeness and Deception

Sixty-five children between the ages of 3 and 6 years of age were tested on their recollection of changed impressions. It was found that impressions updated with determinate information were easier to recall than impressions updated with indeterminate information; impressions changed when trickery was involved were easier to recall than impressions changed when it was not; and although younger children recalled less than older ones did, overall, the effects of informativeness and trickery on recall were similar in both age groups. These findings cannot be accounted for fully by the proposal that younger children have more difficulty than older ones in representing 1 item in 2 different ways simultaneously. Instead, they support the argument that children's degree of success in recalling outdated impressions depends on the means available to distinguish an initial from an updated impression and order the 2 correctly with respect to each other, temporally. This interpretation of the findings draws attention to an aspect of early cognitive development that entails temporal memory processes and is implicated in performance on a variety of tasks.