Effects Of Attention And Warning On Children’s False Memory

False memory is remembering events that never happened, or remembering them quite differently from the way that they happened. False memory, like the correct memory, contains essential information of human memory. With the development of modern cognitive psychology, the phenomenon of false memory is more and more attracted. To explore false memory will help people understand the potential process of human memory.DRM paradigm is the classic paradigm of false memory, which can successfully induce false memory in laboratory situations. Researchers often used the paradigm to study adults’ false memory. They have found that waning and attention are important factors that affecting the false memory. Whether attention has impact on false memory, there are a variety of differences among the experimental results. Whether warning can be effective in improving false memory, there is not a uniform conclusion. It is necessary to investigate the two aspects. Compared with adults, children’s abilities of semantic association, association activation, maintaining and extracting the main points of the traces are still under development and not mature. It is necessary to study children’s false memory.This study used the DRM paradigm and designed two experiments to examine the effects of attention and warning on children’s false memory. Experiment1, examined the impact of attention on children’s false memory, using2(attention condition:focus attention divided attention)×3(grade:first grade, third grade, fifth grade)×3(item type:studied words, critical lures, unrelated words) three-factor mixed design, in which attention condition and grades were tested as between subjects variables, item type was tested as within subjects variable. Experiment2, examined the impact of warning and attention on children’s false memory, using2(warning:no warning、warning before learning phase)×2(attention condition:focus attention、divided attention)×3(grade:first grade, third grade, fifth grade)× 3(item type:studied words, critical lures, unrelated words) four-factor mixed design, in which warning、attention and grades were tested as between subjects variables, item type was tested as within subjects variable.The results show that:(1) In the condition of no warning, in full attention, there are significantly more false memories than in divided attention. In the condition of warning, in divided attention, there are significantly more false memories than in full attention. It indicates that the impact of attention on children’s false memory is sensitive to the warning changes.(2) In full attention, warning can effectively improve children’s false memory; in divided attention, warning can’t improve children’s false memory. It indicates that attention affects the role of warning monitoring on false memory.(3) Children’s false memory has grade effect, that children’s false recognition rate of critical lure increases with the grade growth.