Adults' perceptions of forgetful children: the impact of child age, domain, and memory type

Prospective memory (PM) tasks have been described as social in nature because carrying out one's intentions often has an impact on others. Despite the claim that PM errors [compared to retrospective memory (RM) errors] are perceived as character flaws, little empirical work has tested this assertion. In particular, no study has examined how adults perceive children's PM errors. Thus, the aim of the current studies was to examine adults' perceptions of children's forgetfulness depending on child age (4 vs. 10-year-olds), domain of the memory error (academic vs. social), and memory type (PM vs. RM). In Study 1, adult participants rated children's PM errors on seven traits. Findings showed that social errors were rated more negatively than academic errors, and age and domain interacted such that 10-year-olds were rated more negatively than 4-year-olds for making social errors but not academic errors. Study 2 examined the impact of child age, domain, and memory type on perceptions of forgetful children to specifically test differences between PM and RM errors. Results showed a larger difference between ratings of 10-year-olds for their academic and social memory errors compared to 4-year-olds, but only for RM errors.