The Influence of Encoding Context on the False Recognition Errors of Children and Adults

Nine-year-olds (N = 40) and adults (N = 40) were presented an incidental learning task in which they were asked to give yes or no responses to orienting questions associated with target words. Half the Ss in each group were additionally instructed to generate words which could substitute for the targets and could yield affirmative responses to the orienting questions. Four hours (children) or 24 hours (adults) later, Ss received a recognition test including target words and foils, contextually related or unrelated to the target words by the orienting questions. Children committed more errors of false recognition to contextually related than to contextually unrelated foils, but only when they were explicitly asked to generate alternative words during the incidental learning task. Adults committed more errors to contextually related foils only when they were not explicitly requested to generate words.