Discriminating between memories: evidence for children's spontaneous elaborations

Children are more confused than adults about memories for what they said and what they imagined saying. The present studies examine the extent to which this confusion is related to the person subjects imagine. In Experiment 1, subjects (7, 10, and adult) said words and imagined someone (themselves, a parent, or a friend) saying other words. They were then asked to distinguish words they said from words they imagined. Performance varied with age as well as with the person subjects imagined. Further, performance was better for words subjects imagined than for words they said. Metamemory responses indicated subjects of all ages remembered elaborative processing activated spontaneously during imagination when discriminating between memories. When the nature of subjects encodings was constrained (i.e., subjects said and imagined someone saying words as part of a sentence completion task. Experiment 2), performance declined for all age groups. Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that elaborations reported in response to our metamemory questions occurred during imagination and were not solely prompted by our metamemory questions.