Short-Term Phantom Recollection in 8-10-Year-Olds and Young Adults

Illusory conscious experience of the "presentation" of unstudied material, called phantom recollection, occurs at high levels in long-term episodic memory tests and underlies some forms of false memory. We report an experiment examining, for the first time, the presence of phantom recollection in a short-term working memory (WM) task in 8- to 10-year-old children and young adults. Participants studied lists of eight semantically related words and had to recognize them among unpresented distractors semantically related and unrelated to the studied words after a retention interval of a few seconds. Regardless of whether the retention interval was filled with a concurrent task that interfered with WM maintenance, the false recognition rate for related distractors was very high in both age groups, although it was higher in young adults (47%) than children (42%) and rivaled the rate of target acceptance. The conjoint recognition model of fuzzy-trace theory was used to examine memory representations underlying recognition responses. In young adults, phantom recollection underpinned half of the false memories. By contrast, in children, phantom recollection accounted for only 16% of them. These findings suggest that an increase in phantom recollection use may underlie the developmental increase in short-term false memory.