A Study On The Development Of Reality Monitoring In Preschoolers

A Study on the Development of Reality Monitoring in preschoolersSource monitoring and its development is an important part of the field of research on false memories. Reality monitoring is one kind of source monitoring and it refers to discrimination of memories of actual vs imagined experience. Review of research suggested that most research has been performed on older children's reality monitoring(older than six year old). But recent research showed that initial improvement of reality monitoring occurs in preschool(e.g., Welch-Ross, 1995). The present study examined the development of reality monitoring in 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, the influencing factors of reality monitoring, and the relation between the development of reality monitoring and developmental suggestibility effect.The ability of distinguishing memories of performed vs imagined interactive actions compared, experiment 1 showed that the development of reality monitoring mainly occurs in development of source memory for imagined actions, although average source monitoring ability develops continuously and steadily. And performance on the discrimination task of memories of imagined actions in 3-year-olds were at the level of by chance, however, they could accurately remember the source of memories of real actions. According to present theories, the development of reality monitoring might related to understanding of the concept of imagination, the way of memory representations, general ability to reason, and verbatim memory, etc. But we thought, besides these factors, the development of reality monitoring might related to the development of the two components of executive functioning------reflective-impulsive ability and working memory.From both the perspective of statistic control and experimental manipulation, experiment 2 provided converging evidence that the development of reflective-impulsive ability was the cause of that of reality monitoring. In the statistic control study, results showed that preschoolers' reflective-impulsive ability predicted their reality monitoring well, with age and verbal ability controlled. The experimental manipulation study showed that impulsive 4- and 5- year-olds in experimental group scored higher on the reality monitoring task than their peers in control group. But 3-year-olds didn't gain from this manipulation, which might result from immature of the prefrontal lobe and their understanding of the concept of imagination.Experiment 3 aimed to examine the relation between the development of reality monitoring in preschoolers and the development of working memory. Reverse digitalspan was measured as index of working memory in the present study. Partial correlation analysis showed that reality monitoring was significantly related to working memory, with age and verbal ability controlled. The results of stepwise regression analysis confirmed that working memory made significantly contribution to reality monitoring independent of age and verbal ability. These results suggested preschoolers' ability to discriminate memories of real vs imagined actions develops increasingly with increase of available mental resources.Experiment 4 examined the effect of delay on reality monitoring. Results showed that source confusion of real actions occurred mainly from 3 to 7 days, and source confusion of imagined actions occurred mainly from 0 to 3 three days, and performance on discrimination of imagined actions was sooner to by chance than that of real actions. Because the level of initial encoding of events were not controlled, conclusion that cognitive operations cues faded at a faster rate than sensory perceptual cues was not draw. The present study also found that the longer between learning and test, the more preschoolers identified events which never happened as real events falsely. These results had implication that legal system should interview witness(here refers to 4- and 5-year-olds) immediately after the case happened.Are the children innocent victims on earth or the involuntary sex fantasy fellows? The question connected reality...