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Working Memory Beats Age: Evidence of the Influence of Working Memory on the Production of Children’S Emotional False Memories

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Working Memory Beats Age: Evidence of the Influence of Working Memory on the Production of Children’S Emotional False Memories fpsyg-12-714498 August 12, 2021 Time: 13:34 # 1 BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT published: 18 August 2021 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714498 Working Memory Beats Age: Evidence of the Influence of Working Memory on the Production of Children’s Emotional False Memories Chiara Mirandola1,2* and Francesca Pazzaglia2 1 Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, 2 Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy Emotional valence and working memory ability (WM) affect false memories’ production in adults. Whereas a number of studies have investigated the role of emotional valence in children’s tendency to produce spontaneous false memories, individual differences in WM have not been previously included. In the current article, we were interested in investigating whether emotion and WM would interact in influencing the propensity to incur inferential false memories for scripted events. Ninety-eight typically developing Edited by: children ( first-, third-, and eighth- graders) were administered the Emotional false Beatriz Martín-Luengo, National Research University Higher memory paradigm – allowing to study false memories for negative, positive, and neutral School of Economics, Russia events – and a WM task. Results showed that regardless of age, valence influenced false Reviewed by: memories’ production, such that positive events protected against incurring distortions. Kate Cockcroft, University of the Witwatersrand, Furthermore, WM interacted with valence, such that children with higher WM abilities South Africa produced fewer false memories for negative events. Concerning confidence judgments, Carlos M. Gómez, only the youngest group of children claimed to be overconfident when committing false University of Seville, Spain memories for negative and neutral events. Results are discussed in terms of the role of *Correspondence: Chiara Mirandola individual differences in higher cognitive abilities interacting with the emotional content [email protected] of to-be-remembered events. Specialty section: Keywords: emotion, false memories, working memory, children, confidence This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal INTRODUCTION Frontiers in Psychology Received: 25 May 2021 Emotionally laden events typically lead to better memories than mundane events. A deluge of Accepted: 07 July 2021 studies proved this memory-enhancing effect in adults (e.g., Kensinger, 2009). Nonetheless, adults Published: 18 August 2021 are not exempted from memory distortions when retrieving emotional events (e.g., Kensinger and Citation: Schacter, 2005; Brainerd et al., 2008b; Gallo et al., 2009; Mirandola et al., 2014b, 2017). Whether Mirandola C and Pazzaglia F children benefit from a similar effect of emotion on memory and what factors may influence (2021) Working Memory Beats Age: the development of false memories for emotional events are still debated. The current study was Evidence of the Influence of Working aimed at investigating the relation between the emotional content of to-be-remembered events Memory on the Production of Children’s Emotional False and individual differences in higher cognitive processes, such as working memory capabilities, in Memories. children’s tendency to falsely remember everyday events. Front. Psychol. 12:714498. For neutral material, when false memories stem from elaborating semantically doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714498 related wordlists [as in the widely used Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm; Frontiers in Psychology| www.frontiersin.org 1 August 2021| Volume 12| Article 714498 fpsyg-12-714498 August 12, 2021 Time: 13:34 # 2 Mirandola and Pazzaglia Working Memory and Emotional False Memories Roediger and McDermott, 1995], a developmental reversal protect children – regardless of age – from incurring false emerges in typically developing children: i.e., age-related memories, especially causal errors (Melinder et al., 2017). The increases in memory errors. The DRM paradigm consists of authors suggest that the underdeveloped working memory in the presentation of several wordlists; within each list, words children (as young as 6 years in their study) may have played are semantically related to each other (e.g., sick, nurse, and a role. Evidence in adults with the same paradigm (Mirandola medicine) and to a critical lure not presented at encoding (e.g., et al., 2017) shows that both individual differences in working doctor). Claiming to remember such critical lures at retrieval memory (Exp. 1) and a double task at encoding (Exp. 2) influence represent committing a false memory. Younger children recall or false memories for negative events: indeed, individuals with recognize fewer critical lures than older children and adults. This lower WM abilities produce more false memories for negative developmental reversal applies also to emotional stimuli (Howe, events, thus discarding the protecting effect of emotion on 2007; Brainerd et al., 2010). Both the associative-monitoring false memory production. The hypothesized mechanism is that framework (AAT; Howe, 2005, 2008) and the fuzzy-trace theory individuals with higher WM are better able to manipulate both (FTT; Brainerd et al., 2008a) may explain the developmental useful and irrelevant information, excluding the latter ones reversal. The former predicts that semantically related but non- when unnecessary for the ongoing task. Given that negative presented critical lures are activated at encoding more so than information is more difficult to be inhibited than positive do semantically unrelated words, and that this effect is even information (Osaka et al., 2013), it follows that people with boosted when the critical lures are emotionally charged; thus, it reduced WM would struggle to manipulate negative events and follows that younger children – whose ability to process semantic thus would be more prone to include negative events in their relations among words is not fully developed and undergoes memory, even if not presented (Mirandola et al., 2017). As far important changes due to maturation and education during as children are concerned, given that younger children have development – produce false memories to a lesser extent than lower WM abilities than older children and adults, one would older peers and adults. The FTT instead predicts a similar expect more false memories for negative events in younger developmental increase in false memories since emotionally children. Melinder et al.(2017) found that regardless of age charged events support gist (i.e., thematic) connections more only positive events protected against false memories and that than neutral events and gist connections are responsible for false negative false memories were produced to a similar extent than memory formation. Thus, it follows that the developing ability neutral ones. However, they could only speculate on the possible to detect gist connections among experienced events leads to role of WM given that it was not tested in their sample of increasing production of false memory with increasing age. children. The current study was aimed at specifically testing A more ecologically valid paradigm, the Emotional False the influence of WM abilities on the production of emotional Memory Paradigm (Mirandola et al., 2017) has been recently false memories in children. To this end, we administered the widely used to test spontaneous false memories for emotionally Emotional False Memory Paradigm and the Letter-number valenced events in the entire life-span: older adults (Toffalini sequencing WM subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for et al., 2019), adults (Mirandola et al., 2014b, 2017, 2020; Children to three groups of children in order to detect possible Mirandola and Toffalini, 2016), adolescents (Toffalini et al., 2014, developmental changes: 1st graders, 3rd graders, and 8th graders. 2015) and both typically developing children (Melinder et al., We could hypothesize that younger children – due to lower WM 2017) and children with developmental disorders (Mirandola ability – would produce more false memories for negative events et al., 2014a; Solomon et al., 2019). This paradigm consists of compared to older children. Alternatively, we could hypothesize the presentation of photographs depicting different scripts or that regardless of age, WM would interact with emotional episodes at encoding. Each episode may end either in a positive, valence protecting children from incurring false memories for negative or neutral way. For example, in the dating episode, a boy negative events. and a girl are shown while they are getting ready to go out on a date (e.g., getting dressed, combing their hair, text messaging on the cellphone, etc.). The episode may have a positive (the boy and METHODS the girl are fiancée, and they kiss each other), negative (the boy is aggressive toward the girl for being late) or neutral (the boy Participants and girl are friends and meet for exchanging a textbook) ending. Ninety-eight typically developing children participated to this The causal antecedent – that is the scene depicting what happens study. Specifically, 23 first-grade children (Mage = 82.6, SD = 3.4; in the story right before the episode ending – is not shown females = 10), 40 third-grade children (Mage = 105, SD = 4.4; during encoding, but it is presented at recognition. Claiming females = 20), and 35 eight-grade children (Mage = 156.6, to remember the causal antecedent represents committing an SD = 6.6; females = 12). We determined the
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