PDF submission required. Review course

Writing Tips

before you get started. 

Instructions. Respond to each of the following essay style prompts. For each question, you should include an introduction paragraph that states the purpose of the assignment and outlines the course concepts you will address in your response. Students should address each issue outlined in the question and incorporate ideas learned in class AND through the readings. In text citations should be used to indicate the resources you use to support your ideas (versus strictly providing your own opinion). Be sure to include a closing paragraph for each question. 

Note: You should organize your responses before you start writing. Read each question carefully and think about how best to answer the question based on your knowledge of the course material. You should integrate examples and connections to course material. 

Prompts.

#1) Summarize the historical view of child witnesses including how perceptions have changed over the years to result in the current perspective.  To earn full points, you must a) describe the current view of child witnesses and b) tell your reader what we learned from the mishandling of past child sexual abuse investigations. (Note: You should use 

Brainerd & Reyna, 2012

Actions

 to supplement the course lecture to answer this question. I also expect you’ll support your response using the first two chapters of the textbook.)

#2) Explain the Courts’ reasoning for excluding hearsay statements by default and tell me why hearsay exceptions exist.  Next, choose one of the hearsay exceptions discussed in class and briefly explain the specific rational for this exception. Finally, describe the necessary requirements statements must meet to be considered eligible for the hearsay exception you chose. (Note: You should reference Myers, 2011 when addressing this question. I also expect you’ll support your response using the first two chapters of the textbook.)

Writing Requirements

• Please note your paper must be written in APA style**.  A cover page and abstract are not required but you should cite sources appropriately throughout your paper to support your ideas. You must include a single, APA style reference page (you should include references used for both prompts). Points will be deducted from papers that do not include APA style in-text citations and/or a references list. I strongly encourage you to review the APA style manual if you have any questions about APA style including how to format in-text citations and references list. 
• As noted in the Writing Tips — direct quotes are not allowed!
• Writing takes effort.  I realize students will vary in their writing style and skill set.  I ask that each of you work hard to turn in written responses that reflect your best effort and shows me your true writing ability.  Points will be deducted for informal and/or poor writing.  Consider the following writing tips before you begin (and again once you are ready to submit).  
• **Some of our readings are from an edited book. These readings will be formatted differently than an academic article or textbook written by a single author or group of authors. Please be sure to cite and reference the text readings appropriately.  

Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Developmental Review

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / d r

Reliability of children’s testimony in the era
of developmental reversals

C.J. Brainerd ⇑, V.F. Reyna
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:
Available online 2 August 201

2

Keywords:
Children’s testimony
False memory
Fuzzy-trace theory
Developmental reversals

0273-2297/$ – see front matter � 2012 Elsevier I

n

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2012.06.008

⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of
United States. Fax: +1 607 255 9856.

E-mail address: cb299@cornell.edu (C.J. Brainer

a b s t r a c t

A hoary assumption of the law is that children are more prone to
false-memory reports than adults, and hence, their testimony is less
reliable than adults’. Since the 1980s, that assumption has been
buttressed by numerous studies that detected declines in false
memory between early childhood and young adulthood under con-
trolled conditions. Fuzzy-trace theory predicted reversals of this
standard developmental pattern in circumstances that are directly
relevant to testimony because they involve using the gist of experi-
ence to remember events. That prediction has been investigated
during the past decade, and a large number of experiments have
been published in which false memories have indeed been found
to increase between early childhood and young adulthood. Further,
experimentation has tied age increases in false memory to
improvements in children’s memory for semantic gist. According
to current scientific evidence, the principle that children’s testi-
mony is necessarily more infected with false memories than adults’
and that, other things being equal, juries should regard adults’ tes-
timony as necessarily more faithful to actual events is untenable.

� 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

To say that the reliability of child witnesses’ memories has been a controversial topic is an
understatement of rather large proportions. Along with recovery of repressed memories (e.g., Loftus
& Ketcham, 1994), false eyewitness identifications (e.g., Wells et al., 1998), and false confessions
(e.g., Kassin & Kiechel, 1996), it has been one of the most contentious areas of psycho-legal research

c. All rights reserved.

Human Development, Cornell University, B-43 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853,

d).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2012.06.008

mailto:cb299@cornell.edu

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2012.06.008

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02732297

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/dr

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 225

during the past quarter-century (Ceci & Bruck, 1995). To understand why, it is necessary to turn back
the clock to the 1980s and consider two developments that first focused attention squarely on the
memories of child witnesses. One was legal—namely, the withering away of child competence statutes
that had excluded evidence from child witnesses on grounds of presumptive unreliability. The second
was a clash between the traditional view of children’s memories as being infected with faulty recol-
lections and a revisionist view, according to which children’s memories for certain types of criminal
events are quite accurate.

Taking competence statutes first, the important background consideration here is that certain
types of cases usually cannot be prosecuted without evidence from child witnesses. The classic exam-
ples are private crimes in which children are victims—crimes that may not leave reliable physical evi-
dence—such as sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. Other examples are common home-based crimes
for which children are often the only independent witnesses, such as spousal violence and the produc-
tion of controlled substances. Historically, in most states, evidence from children was routinely ex-
cluded on the ground that they are not competent witnesses because, among other things, the line
between fantasy and reality is blurry in children (McGough, 1993). Their presumed inaccurate mem-
ories, both in the sense of poor recollection of actual events and elevated recollection of events that
did not happen, was a key factor in this view of child witnesses, one that seemed to derive ample sup-
port from early research on the accuracy of child witnesses (Binet, 1900; Small, 1896; Stern, 1910;
Varendonck, 1911; Whipple, 1909). An impetus for revisiting and modifying exclusionary statutes
emerged in the 1970s, when most states made physicians mandated reporters of suspected child
abuse and the passage by the United States Congress of The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment
Act specified that in addition to physical abuse, sexual and emotional abuse qualified as child abuse.
A federal office for gathering and reporting statistics on child abuse was established in the wake of
that law, and data that were subsequently reported seemed to show an alarming rise in child sexual
abuse from year to year. For instance, the proportion of abuse and neglect reports that involved sexual
abuse doubled during the 1980s (Poole & Lamb, 1998). That circumstance focused attention on pros-
ecution of such crimes, not only to punish the guilty but also to save vulnerable children from re-
peated victimization. Between the mid-1970s and the beginning of the 1990s, the number of child
sexual abuse prosecutions nearly doubled nationwide. An important aid to such prosecutions was that
legal barriers to evidence from child witnesses had been removed, making it possible for child victims
to testify against defendants (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; McGough, 1993). Eventually, in 2006, Congress
passed Federal Rules of Evidence 601 (The Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives,
2006), which made statutory exclusion of evidence from child witnesses very difficult by specifying
that juries should decide how much weight to assign to such evidence.

A consequence of mandating broad admissibility of child testimony is that the burden of proof falls
squarely on the shoulders of children’s memories in crimes that leave no reliable physical evidence
and to which children are the only witnesses (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). That raises an obvious ques-
tion: What about the traditional notion, which seemed to be well supported by data, that children are
highly unreliable witnesses—so unreliable that early researchers had claimed that children’s evidence
can only mislead jurors? This brings us to the second development, the clash between traditional and
revisionist answers to that question.

Without putting too fine point on it, a new interpretation was put forward, particularly among
child advocacy professionals, that even young children’s memories for certain types of events—espe-
cially ones involving their own bodies, such as those that figure in child sexual abuse—are quite accu-
rate and are therefore exceptions to the rule that susceptibility to false memory is too high for children
to be reliable witnesses. The emergence of this position during the 1980s is documented in a review by
Ceci and Friedman (2000). As they discuss, proponents argued that when, as in abuse and neglect,
crimes are traumatic events that involve children’s bodies and that they have therefore directly experi-
enced (rather than merely observed), their recollections of those events are accurate and quite resis-
tant to falsification. In short, reports of such events, even by young children, are not apt to be either
spontaneous false memories or false memories that arise from external suggestion. That, in turn, led to
the recommendation that suggestive and leading questions could be used to stimulate disclosures
during investigations of child abuse allegations because such questions were unlikely to stimulate
false allegations (Ceci & Friedman, 2000). Because young children typically volunteer few recollections

226 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

of anything when asked in a general way about the events of their lives, the use of suggestive and lead-
ing questions became prevalent in abuse investigations (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). Although this served
the highly desirable goals of prosecuting abusers and preventing re-victimization of children, by
increasing the ease of investigative documentation of abuse from victims, there was a weak link in
the revisionist position: It was based on little in the way of new scientific findings, and such findings
as there were are open to methodological challenges (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005).

Not surprisingly, child memory researchers remained skeptical of the revisionist position and pro-
ceeded to evaluate it under controlled experimental conditions. What followed was a series of exper-
iments that were ultimately interpreted as demonstrating that young children are less resistant to
suggestion-induced false memories than older children or adults (e.g., Ceci, Ross, & Togiia, 1987)—
including false memories of quasi-sexual events involving their bodies (e.g., Poole & Lindsay, 1995)
and of physically and emotionally painful events involving their bodies (e.g., Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur,
& Barr, 1995). We say ‘‘ultimately interpreted’’ because, from the start, there was some disagreement
about whether the data actually showed that young children were less resistant to suggestion-induced
false memories than older children or adults (see various chapters in Doris, 1991). That disagreement
was stimulated by the fact that although age declines in suggestibility were detected in early studies
such as Ceci et al.’s, they were not detected in other early studies (e.g., Howe, 1991; Marin, Holmes,
Guth, & Kovac, 1979). Moreover, failures to detect age declines in suggestibility are not confined to
early studies, an experiment by Poole and Lindsay (2001) being a case in point. Those authors reported
a carefully designed study of 3- to 8-year-olds’ susceptibility to memory suggestions provided by their
parents about staged events (science demonstrations). Both recognition and recall tests were used to
measure false memory. Both types of tests showed that parental suggestion created false memories at
all age levels, but age trends were different for recognition and recall. False memories declined by
roughly 50% between 3 and 8 on recognition tests but did not vary with age on recall tests. Beyond
the controversy over now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t age trends, an often-voiced counterargument
to all of these experiments is that even massively consistent evidence of age declines in suggestibility
would not completely cut the ground from under the revisionist view because researchers cannot, for
ethical reasons, create false memories of events that the law classifies as crimes.

Such objections were eventually swept aside by two events, one scientific and the other public. The
scientific event was the publication by Ceci and Bruck (1993) of the first comprehensive review of the
developmental literature on memory suggestibility. Those authors acknowledged the controversy
over now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t age trends, and carefully reviewed the evidence on both sides.
They concluded their review with a table that, to most readers’ eyes, revealed a strong signal embed-
ded in the noise. The table listed all developmental suggestibility experiments that had been reported
to date, appending a plus mark to those that had detected age declines and a minus mark to those that
had detected no age trends. (No experiment had detected age increases.) The table spoke volumes:
There were pluses appended to 83% of the experiments.

The public event was that some sexual abuse prosecutions involving young children (primarily pre-
schoolers) received wide spread media coverage, provoking public outcry (for a review of these cases,
see Ceci & Bruck, 1995). In the public mind, one reason that those prosecutions appeared questionable
was that the acts of child sexual abuse for which the defendants were tried and, in some instances, con-
victed were bizarre and improbable. For instance, in State of New Jersey v. Michaels (1994) a preschool
teacher was convicted of 115 counts of sexual abuse involving 20 child victims, but the children’s alle-
gations against her included such strange behavior as playing the piano in front of the classroom while
nude. Ultimately, the conviction was reversed by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which concluded that
such bizarre allegations may have been false memories that were created by suggestive questioning. In
other cases that captured public attention (e.g., State of California v. Buckey, 1990), details of weird acts
of child sexual abuse were contradicted by physical evidence presented at trial.

As the only evidence of criminal acts in these cases consisted of children’s allegations, which were
often obtained with suggestive questioning, the cases raised reliability concerns among child memory
researchers. The result has been the production of an extensive literature on false memory during the
preschool-to-young–adult age range and on variables that increase and decrease susceptibility to false
memory, work that continues to the present day. Susceptibility to spontaneous false memories and to
false memories that are implanted via suggestion have both been extensively studied, and multiple

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 227

reviews of both strands of research are available (see Bruck & Ceci, 1999; Ceci & Bruck, 1993, 1995;
Goodman, 2006; Goodman & Schaaf, 1997; Holliday, Reyna, & Hayes, 2002; Quas, Qin, Schaaf, & Good-
man, 1997; Reyna, Mills, Estrada, & Brainerd, 2007), some of them written by contributors to this spe-
cial issue. Although the scientific study of children’s false memory has produced a data archive of
enduring legal significance, our interest lies specifically with what can be called massive evidence
of a global developmental decline in such errors between early childhood and young adulthood.
The evidence of age decline is quite broad-based inasmuch as this trend has been detected with a vari-
ety of false-memory paradigms. With respect to spontaneous false memory, declines have been re-
ported in paradigms that range from false memory for unpresented synonyms and same-category
exemplars of words presented on lists (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1996; Brainerd, Reyna, & Brandse,
1995; Brainerd, Reyna, & Kneer, 1995), to false memory for paraphrases of literal and metaphorical
statements (Reyna & Kiernan, 1994, 1995), to false memory for source details (Ackerman, 1992,
1994; Ackil & Zaragoza, 1995), to false memory for real-world events during free and cued recall of
live event sequences (Pipe, Gee, Wilson, & Egerton, 1999; Poole & White, 1991), to false memory
for words during free and cued recall of word lists (Bjorklund & Muir, 1988), to false memory for
numerical information on mathematics problems (Brainerd & Gordon, 1994). The evidence of age de-
clines in susceptibility to suggestion-induced false memories is even more vast and includes age de-
clines in implanted false memories of thefts (e.g., Bjorklund, Bjorklund, & Brown, 1998; Bjorklund
et al., 2000), events that children knowingly confabulate (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1998), personal traumatic
experiences (e.g., Goodman, Quas, Batterman-Faunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn, 1994), quasi-sexual
events involving children’s bodies (e.g., Poole & Lindsay, 1995), and physically and emotionally painful
events involving children’s bodies (e.g., Bruck et al., 1995). Considering that the same studies generally
show that true memories (i.e., for events that actually happened) increase with age as false memories
are decreasing, the overall pattern is one of steady developmental improvements in net accuracy.

Such research had direct forensic implications for the reliability of children’s evidence. Obviously, it
echoed the traditional view that the line between fantasy and reality is not as sharply drawn in children
as it is in adults. At a more specific level, the picture was that, on the one hand, children’s memories are
not as utterly unreliable as the law had once assumed, but on the other hand, key items of evidence in
witnesses’ reports are increasingly likely to be false memories as witnesses become younger and youn-
ger. This leads to two principles that juries can apply in judging the credibility of evidence that is pro-
vided by children (Brainerd, Reyna, & Zember, 2011). First, when children are the only sources of
evidence that bears directly on guilt (as is common in cases involving child abuse and neglect), due
weight must be given to the fact that there is an elevated risk that the evidence is tainted by false mem-
ories. Second, when children and adults are both sources of evidence that bears directly on guilt (as is
common in certain domestic crimes and child custody disputes), due weight must be given to the fact
that children’s evidence is more apt to be tainted by false memories than adults’. For the past two dec-
ades, ideas such as these and the scientific findings that support them have been centerpieces of expert
testimony in thousands of cases in which evidence from children was presented. The accumulated
weight of such testimony, coupled with intense media scrutiny of certain cases, has led some courts
to rule that knowledge of child witnesses’ susceptibility to false memories now extends beyond the sci-
entific and legal communities to include the lay public (Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008). It has thus be-
come increasingly frequent for courts to rule that because children’s heightened susceptibility to false
memories is common-sense knowledge, expert scientific testimony is no longer needed to establish
this fact in court, and juries can simply be instructed to consider it in weighing the credibility of chil-
dren’s evidence (McAuliff, Nicholson, & Ravanshenas, 2007).

Against this background, our concern in this article lies with the fact that these established ideas
about child witnesses are now under challenge by false memory research that has appeared during
the past decade. This may seem surprising considering that the number of studies that show age de-
clines in false memory (coupled with age increases in true memory) is so extensive. As we discuss in
the first section below, however, there is a clear theoretical basis for predicting that in some situations
that are of definite forensic relevance, false memories will grow with age and net accuracy will
decline. That basis falls out of a standard account of adults’ false memories, fuzzy-trace theory
(FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2005; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995), as well as prior research in which FTT was
used to predict developmental reversals in reasoning (situations in which reasoning biases and

228 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

illusions wax rather than wane between early childhood and young adulthood; for a review, see Reyna
& Brainerd, 2011). As we discuss in the second section below, many developmental studies have ap-
peared that not only confirm counterintuitive reversals in the developmental trajectory of false mem-
ory and net age declines in memory accuracy, but more important for the courts, evaluate the memory
processes that cause such reversals. This new developmental reversal pattern, like the pattern that
preceded it, has extensive forensic implications, the most obvious of which is that the default assump-
tion that children’s evidence is more infected by false memories than adults’ is questioned by data that
show clear exceptions to this rule.

Theoretical reasons for developmental reversals

Before the current surge of research on developmental reversals in false memory, some of the con-
tributors to this special issue noted that there were theoretical reasons for predicting that certain vari-
eties of false memories could increase dramatically and net accuracy could decline with age (Brainerd
& Reyna, 1998; Ceci & Bruck, 1998). Moreover, those varieties were of forensic relevance because, like
memory for crimes, they are rooted in understanding and retrieving meaningful connections (‘‘the
gist’’) that exist between experienced events. At about the same time, Brainerd and Mojardin
(1998) reported a confirmation of the developmental reversal prediction, using a narrative memory
paradigm that had been developed by Reyna and Kiernan (1994). They found that when children lis-
tened to short narratives that established simple meaning relations among target items (The coffee is
hotter than the tea. The tea is hotter than the cocoa. The cocoa is sweet.), the probability of falsely remem-
bering hearing unpresented sentences that preserved narrative gist (The tea is cooler than the coffee) in-
creased from 7% to 25% to 26% to 30% in 6-, 8-, 11-, and 20-year-olds.

The false memories that crop up in legal evidence are what memory researchers call semantic false
memories because, like this narrative example, they preserve the meaning of true information. What
are the grounds for supposing that such distortions will sometimes increase between early childhood
and young adulthood? They can be found in the prevailing approach to explaining semantic false
memories in adults, opponent-processes models (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). Theories of this sort were
first formulated because older ones were unable to handle the experimental dissociations that were
observed between true and false memories, across various tasks and manipulations (Brainerd & Reyna,
1995; Brainerd et al., 1995; Reyna & Kiernan, 1994, 1995). The core assumption is that there are dis-
tinct memory processes that contribute in opposite ways to true and false memory—in particular, pro-
cesses that simultaneously enhance true memory and suppress false memory. One such model, FTT,
was used by Ceci and Bruck (1998) and Brainerd and Reyna (1998) to generate developmental reversal
predictions.

According to FTT, subjects store dissociated verbatim and gist representations of experience (Reyna
& Brainerd, 1995). Verbatim traces are representations of events’ surface features, such as the shape,
color, size, and texture of an object (e.g., a Coke can), and features of the contexts in which they are
encountered. Gist traces, on the other hand, are representations of events’ senses, patterns, and mean-
ings—most commonly in memory research, their semantic features (e.g., soda) and contextual features
as well. Thus, while the information in verbatim traces captures surface qualities that can be directly
experienced in events, the information in gist traces must be accessed using events as retrieval cues
and is therefore more subject to individual differences in knowledge and learning history (Brainerd &
Reyna, 1995). Because verbatim and gist traces are tagged with contextual features, they are episodic
representations; personal records of the events of our lives, which are retrieved when we respond to
memory tests that enquire about the putative content of those events. On such tests (‘‘Did you drink a
Coke at lunch?’’), either verbatim traces, gist traces, or both may be accessed.

FTT posits that although both types of traces support true memory, they have opposite effects on
false memory. If you drank a Coke at lunch, retrieving a verbatim trace of holding a red Coke can in the
cafeteria or a gist trace of ordering a soda support true memory for that event because the surface fea-
tures of the former and the semantic features of the latter both match the surface and semantic fea-
tures of the putative event. When it comes to false memories of related events, such as drinking a
Pepsi, Sprite, or 7-Up, retrieving this same verbatim trace suppresses them because surface features
mismatch, but retrieving the corresponding gist trace supports them because semantic features match

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 229

(Brainerd & Reyna, 2002). Hence, false memory for events that preserve salient aspects of the meaning
content of experience depends on which types of traces are accessed, which in turn will depend on the
sorts of retrieval cues that are supplied and on the relative availability of verbatim and gist traces in
storage. The latter is especially subject to age variability and is a key consideration in predicting devel-
opmental reversals in false memory.

These few distinctions about the representations that foment versus suppress false memories sug-
gest a general approach to increasing the strength of memory distortions, which can then be filled in
with a range of specific manipulations. In that approach, levels of false memory ought to rise when a
manipulation has either or both of two effects: (a) It increases subjects’ tendency to access gist traces
on memory tests, or (b) it reduces their tendency to access verbatim traces on memory tests. A manip-
ulation could produce such effects on either the front or back end of an experiment; that is, the effects
could be generated by influencing the tendency to store these distinct types of traces in the first place
(an availability influence) or by influencing the tendency to retrieve them on memory tests (an acces-
sibility influence) or both. Front- and back-end manipulations have both been investigated in the adult
literature (for a review, see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). A simple front-end manipulation that should
strengthen of gist traces relative to verbatim traces consists of exposing subjects to several distinct
events that all share the same salient meaning. In our illustration of drinking a Coke, subjects might
be exposed to a written narrative or a video in which a central character named Bob drinks one of sev-
eral sweet, fizzy, sodas at different meals—say, 7-Up, A&W, Coke, Fresca, Mountain Dew, RC, Sprite,
Squirt, and Vernors. This procedure repeatedly instantiates ‘‘soda,’’ presumably creating very strong
gist traces of that meaning, but it does not create correspondingly strong verbatim traces of the indi-
vidual drinks because each appeared only once in the story. Sometime later, subjects respond to rec-
ognition tests on which the false memory items ask whether Bob consumed other familiar sodas (e.g.,
Crush, Dr. Pepper, Jolt, Pepsi, Tab). Relative to a control condition in which Bob only drinks a Coke, sub-
jects should display elevated levels of false memory for these other sodas, for two reasons. First, the
type of gist memory that supports such distortions has been greatly strengthened (and is thus more
apt to be retrieved), in comparison to verbatim traces of the individual drinks (Reyna & Brainerd,
1995). Second, even if a verbatim trace (say, that Bob drank an RC) is retrieved when one of these
false-memory items (say, that Bob drank a Pepsi) is tested, it will not be especially effective at sup-
pressing an error because subjects know that Bob drank many sodas other than RC, one of which
may have been a Pepsi (Brainerd, Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003).

Here, we should remind ourselves of a point that is pertinent to our ultimate concern with the reli-
ability of child witnesses’ memories: Procedures in which subjects experience many events that share
salient meaning are analogues to everyday remembering. For instance, consider the numerous exam-
ples of meaning-sharing objects and events that populate our experience as we move through our dai-
ly activities (eating breakfast, driving to work, attending class, shopping for groceries, attending a
sporting event). Procedures that echo this property of real-world experience—which, for obvious rea-
sons, are called connected-meaning tasks—have often been found to elevate false memory. Indeed, a
paradigm that has been intensively studied in the adult literature, the Deese/Roediger/McDermott
(DRM; Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) illusion, is just such a task. The DRM illusion in-
volves studying short lists of 12–15 familiar words, followed by free recall tests or recognition tests.
The lists are special ones that have been constructed from norms of word association (e.g., Nelson,
McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1999). To generate such a list, a familiar word is identified that has many for-
ward associates in such norms (e.g., words such anger, chair, doctor, and sweet), and the first 12–15
forward associates are selected (for chair, its first 15 forward associates are table, sit, legs, seat, couch,
desk, recliner, sofa, wood, cushion, swivel, stool, sitting, rocking, bench). This is self-evidently a connected-
meaning list owing to all the familiar semantic relations that the words share. [A quantitative seman-
tic analysis of DRM lists can be found in Brainerd, Yang, Howe, Reyna, and Mills (2008).] When a DRM
list is presented for study, subjects are exposed to the forward associates of the generating word but
not to the generating word itself. That word, which is called the critical distractor or critical lure, is
used to measure false memory on recall or recognition tests. In individual experiments, subjects are
exposed to several such lists, and the modal result is remarkably high levels of false memory for crit-
ical distractors: For the lists generated by anger, chair, doctor, and sweet, for instance, the mean level of
false recall is 54%, and the mean level of false recognition is 76% in young adults (see Roediger,

230 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001). It is difficult to over emphasize just how powerful this illusion is:
Immediately after exposure to the list table, sit, . . ., bench, 54% of college students, on average, recall
that chair was on the list, and remarkably, they usually recall realistic details of its ‘‘presentation’’—
such as the gender of the voice in which chair was ‘‘pronounced’’ or the font in which chair was
‘‘printed’’ (Brainerd, Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003; Payne, Elie, Blackwell, & Neuschatz, 1996).

Turning to back-end manipulations, this is the realm of relative accessibility of verbatim and gist
traces, which can be influenced by the retrieval cues that are provided on memory tests and by differ-
ential forgetting rates. The general principle, naturally, is that false memory should increase as a func-
tion of variables that, at the time memory is tested, enhance gist retrieval relative to verbatim
retrieval. Increasing the delay between subjects’ exposure to target events and the administration
of memory tests is a frequently studied example, owing to many classic experiments showing that
the ability to access memories of the surface details of events degrades more rapidly than the ability
to access memories of their semantic content (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1985; Kintsch, Welsch, Schmalhofer,
& Zimny, 1990). Thus, if memory tests are delayed for a few hours or days following events, an interval
during which verbatim decline is rapid but memory for meaning content is relatively stable, semantic
false memory ought to increase because gist retrieval comes to predominate—a prediction that has
been confirmed for many types of meaningful events (for illustrations, see Brainerd, Reyna, & Estrada,
2006; Gallo, 2006; Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978; Payne et al., 1996; Reyna & Kiernan, 1994, 1995; Sea-
mon et al., 2002). Actually, even shorter delays can produce dramatic differences in false memory
when events are sufficiently complex—sentences in narratives, for instance—that verbatim memories
are difficult to retain. Here, the first modern example of a developmental reversal study (Brainerd &
Mojardin, 1998) is a case in point. In an earlier study, Reyna and Kiernan (1994) detected the standard
age decline pattern in children’s false memory for sentences (The tea is cooler than the coffee) that pre-
served the meaning of sentences that children had actually heard (The coffee is hotter than the tea. The
tea is hotter than the cocoa. The cocoa is sweet.). In their procedure, the accessibility of verbatim traces
of sentences was maximized by administering test items immediately following the presentation of
each three-sentence narrative. Brainerd and Mojardin used the same procedure, except that they in-
creased the delay between sentence presentation and memory tests to roughly two minutes. The re-
sult was an age increase in false memory rather than a decrease.

With respect to retrieval cues on memory tests, the familiar principle of encoding specificity (Tul-
ving & Thomson, 1971) can be exploited to identify cues that ought to shift retrieval in either a ver-
batim direction or a gist direction. According to encoding specificity, presenting retrieval cues that
reinstate the surface features of events (e.g., the gender, pitch, and accent of the voice in which word
lists or narratives were spoken) increases the match between those cues and the verbatim traces that
contain representations of such features. Consequently, retrieval cues that closely reproduce the sur-
face features of events should reduce false memory, which they do (Arndt & Reder, 2003; Brainerd,
Wright, Reyna, & Payne, 2002; Brainerd et al., 1995; Reyna & Kiernan, 1994), by enhancing verbatim
retrieval. On the other hand, encoding specificity predicts that retrieval cues that reinstate salient as-
pects of the meaning of events will have the opposite effect, by increasing the match between those
cues and the content of gist traces. This prediction has also been confirmed in various experiments
(e.g., Lampinen, Copeland, & Neuschatz, 2001), with simple instructions that encourage subjects to re-
lax the tendency to emphasize vivid recollection of surface details when responding to memory tests
being quite effective (e.g., Koriat & Goldsmith, 1994, 1996; Payne et al., 1996).

Now that some theoretical principles are in hand, along with a few simple manipulations that
implement them, we return to the question of developmental reversals in false memory. The theoret-
ical principles say that other things being equal, variability in the rates of verbatim and gist retrieval
determine variability in levels of false memory. With connected-meaning tasks, the extensive litera-
ture on the development of semantic processing in memory (for reviews, see Schneider & Bjorklund,
1998; Schneider & Pressley, 1997) supplies compelling reasons for anticipating that such tasks will re-
veal parallel increases in false memory. At a minimum, though, the theoretical principles tell us that
the standard age decline pattern cannot be the whole story unless some very special conditions are
met that we already know are violated by normal development. Specifically, the pattern would be
the whole story only if the suppressive side of opponent processes (the verbatim component) waxes
between early childhood and young adulthood, while the supportive side (the gist component) either

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 231

wanes or remains invariant. Although the first condition is true, the second is violated by most of what
we know about semantic development and its influence on memory—specifically, that the tendency to
store and retrieve the semantic features of events and to form semantic connections among events im-
prove massively between early childhood and young adulthood.

Classic illustrations of that trend can be found in the developmental literature on semantic organi-
zation in recall, which shows large increases in spontaneous memory for meaning content and mean-
ing relations when children are exposed to lists of familiar words or pictures of familiar objects (for
reviews, see Bjorklund, 1987; Reyna, 1996). Increases in memory for an especially important form
of meaning content, taxonomic relations, has been thoroughly documented. When adults study pic-
ture or word lists on which the individual items belong to some standard taxonomic categories
(e.g., clothing, furniture, fruit, vehicles), their recall exhibits three characteristic effects that suggest
that they are storing strong gist traces of taxonomic relations and using them on recall tests to output
items (Brown, Flores, Goodman, & Conover, 1991). (a) Total recall is better with such lists than with
unrelated lists composed of items of comparable difficulty. (b) The output of items during free recall
is clustered by category, as though subjects say to themselves: ‘‘There were clothing, furniture, fruit,
and vehicles on the list. Let’s see how many items of clothing I can get, then I’ll try furniture, then fruit,
and then vehicles.’’ (c) Such semantic clustering is good for recall because total output increases as the
amount of clustering increases. The remarkable thing about memory development is that during the
preschool and early childhood years, children exhibit very little evidence of these elementary seman-
tic effects, even though lists are composed of items whose meanings they know and that they can
identify when asked (Bjorklund, 2004; Bjorklund & Hock, 1982; Bjorklund & Jacobs, 1985; Bjorklund
& Muir, 1988; Chi & Ceci, 1987). The overall pattern is that unless young children are explicitly
prompted to store and retrieve taxonomic content, these three effects emerge very slowly during
childhood, and they continue to strengthen through adolescence into young adulthood.

In short, based on available data, the known picture of developmental change in verbatim and gist
memory is that availability/accessibility of both improves with age (Bouwmeester, Vermunt, & Sijts-
ma, 2007; Brainerd & Reyna, 2004; Reyna, Holliday, & Marche, 2002). The key implication, which is
surprising in light of all the published evidence of age declines in false memory, is that whether false
memory declines, increases, or remains fixed across age levels will be highly task dependent. Remember
in this connection that we have already seen that the mix of experimental conditions on different
tasks affects the relative availability/accessibility of verbatim and gist traces. This means that some
tasks will be more sensitive to subject variation in verbatim memory whereas others will be more sen-
sitive to subject variation in gist memory. Ontogenesis is a prime source of both types of variation. If
the developmental baseline is one of age improvements in availability/accessibility of both types of
traces, the standard pattern of age declines in false memory is favored in tasks that maximize verbatim
sensitivity while maximizing gist sensitivity (Brainerd & Reyna, 1998; Ceci & Bruck, 1998), but the
opposite pattern is favored in tasks that minimize verbatim sensitivity while maximizing gist sensi-
tivity (Brainerd, Reyna, & Forrest, 2002). In other words, when specific tasks are highly sensitive to
variations in verbatim memory but not to variations in gist memory, declines in false memory will
predominate because performance is chiefly controlled by variations in verbatim memory, but when
verbatim-gist sensitivity is reversed, increases in false memory will predominate because perfor-
mance is chiefly controlled by variations in gist memory.

Connected-meaning paradigms, the DRM illusion in particular, are rather unambiguous examples
of high-gist/low-verbatim tasks because, as we saw, they strengthen gist memory relative to verbatim
memory, and they make it difficult to use verbatim retrieval to suppress false memories. Therefore,
Brainerd et al. (2002) proposed that these paradigms were obvious places to initiate the search for ro-
bust, replicable developmental reversals in false memory that, once identified, could be used to test
theoretical hypotheses about processes that control age trends in false memory. That proposal was
grounded in two considerations that we have discussed—namely, that (a) children’s known limitations
in storing and retrieving even simple semantic content imply that their performance on connected-
meaning tasks will not be dominated by the strong gist memories that dominate adults’ performance
and (b) these tasks minimize the effectiveness of verbatim memory in suppressing errors (so that age
improvements in that sphere will not override the influence of improvements in gist memory). These
considerations also suggest that it should be possible to tie developmental reversals in false memory

232 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

directly to two general classes of experimental manipulations: sufficiency manipulations, which are
variables that selectively increase false memory in younger subjects (thereby shrinking the size of
developmental reversals) by compensating for their limitations in gist memory and necessity manip-
ulations, which are variables that selectively decrease false memory in older subjects (thereby also
shrinking the size of developmental reversals) by interfering with their superior gist memory abilities.
We shall have more to say on both heads in the third section of this paper, after we sketch accumu-
lated developmental reversal findings in the next section.

Finally, the theoretical principles discussed above are ideas about memory, obviously. In early
developmental research on one of the two basic varieties of false memory, the suggestion-induced
form, non-memorial concepts—specifically, ideas about age differences in compliance and in motiva-
tion to comply with external direction—were also considered as possible sources of children’s false
memories. In this paper, we do not consider such processes as potential sources of developmental
reversal effects, for two reasons. First, the traditional view of compliance and motivation to comply
is that they are elevated in younger children, which predicts age decreases in false memory (Ceci &
Bruck, 1993). Second, a standard finding from much research on false memory is that motivational
and compliance factors account for small amounts of variance, relative to memory factors (for a re-
view, see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005).

Core lines of evidence

We turn now to the empirical meat, a synopsis of the results of studies that have identified child-
to-adult increases in false memory, using connected-meaning paradigms. Throughout, we will refer to
information in Table 1, which contains all the recent examples that we could locate of developmental
reversal articles that met two conditions—namely, that the articles were written in English and that
they were published in peer-reviewed journals. Even with those constraints, it can be seen that the
accumulated evidence of age increases in false memory is quite extensive, consisting of 49 journal
articles by investigators from several countries (Australia, Canada, Holland, Portugal, United Kingdom,
United States) who tested memory in multiple languages (Dutch, English, French, Portuguese). As can
also be seen, some articles reported more than one experiment, so that the number of individual
experiments in which developmental reversals have been detected is more than 49.

Our summary of the developmental reversal data base proceeds in two steps. First, in the present
section, we will concentrate on age trends; on specific findings of increases in false memory be-
tween early childhood and young adulthood. This part of the summary will be organized by exper-
imental paradigm. Referring to Table 1, although developmental reversals have been produced with
various paradigms, some clear organizing themes pop out, the most obvious being frequency. Here,
it is the DRM illusion versus all other procedures: Scanning down the third column, which describes
the procedure that was implemented in each article, it is seen that the DRM illusion was used in 35
articles while other procedures were used in 23 articles. (The sum exceeds 49 because multiple
procedures were used in some articles.) The next most common procedure, which was used in 8
articles, consists of presenting sets of categorized materials (words or pictures) to children and mea-
suring false memory for unpresented exemplars of presented categories (e.g., testing false memory
for piano and drums after studying a word list on which guitar, violin, trumpet, clarinet, trombone,
oboe, saxophone, and tuba appeared). The remaining procedures consist of an assortment of methods,
such as lists of phonologically or emotionally related words, narratives, reasoning problems, and
videos of crimes. To summarize developmental reversal findings, we follow this frequency
pattern—beginning with the DRM illusion and devoting the most space to it, then continuing with
experiments that used categorized materials, and ending with results from the miscellaneous
remaining tasks.

The second step in our review, which we postpone until the section after this, focuses on testing
theoretical hypotheses—more explicitly, on results that have been produced by manipulations that
embody specific processes, availability/accessibility of verbatim and gist memories in particular, that
are thought to foment or to suppress children’s false memories. Here, we use the necessity-sufficiency
mode of organization; that is, we consider variables that, theoretically, ought to reduce age increases in
false memory either by interfering with older subjects’ superior gist memory abilities (necessity

Table

1

Recent studies of developmental reversals in false memory.

Articles Age span # Exps.
reported
in article

Memory tests Key results

Anastasi et al. (2008) 5-adult 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
both child- and adult-normed normed DRM lists

Bouwmeester and
Verkoeijen (2010)

7–12 1 Dutch DRM
lists

Age increases in false recognition that depended
positively on gist memory not on verbatim memory. Gist
and verbatim memory were separated with latent class
analysis

Brainerd et al. (2002) 5-adult 3 Strong versus
weak DRM
lists

Age increases in false recognition and false recall that
were larger for strong than for weak DRM lists

Brainerd et al. (2004) 7–14 1 DRM and
categorized
lists

Age increases in false recognition for DRM and for
categories. Two gist components of false memory
(phantom recollection and familiarity) and one verbatim
component (recollection rejection) were separated with
the conjoint recognition model

Brainerd et al. (2006) 6–14 3 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition and false recall. Gist
cuing before list presentation reduced age increases in
false memory. Smaller age increases for learning
disabled children than for nondisabled children.

Age

increases in false recognition on 1-week delayed tests as
well as immediate tests

Brainerd and Reyna
(2007)

6–14 2 Categorized
lists

Age increases in false recognition of unpresented
exemplars of studied categories when 8 exemplars per
category were studied but not when 1 exemplar per
category was studied

Brainerd, Reyna, Ceci,
and Holliday (2008)

5–17 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition. Gist cuing increased
false memory but not true memory and reduced age
increases in false memory. List repetition increased true
but not false memory

Brainerd et al. (2010) 7-adult 1 Emotional lists Age increases in false recognition, greater false
recognition for negative than for positive valence,
greater age increases for negative than for positive
valence. Increasing arousal amplifies the effects of
negative valence

Carneiro, Albuquerque,
and Fernandez
(2009)

3–12 2 Portuguese
DRM lists with
basic-level
critical
distractors

Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
basic-level critical distractors but not for superordinate
critical distractors

Carneiro and
Fernandez (2010)

4–12 2 DRM lists Age increases in false recall and false recognition when
children were not warned about the illusion but age
decreases when they were warned. Larger age increases
in false memory with fast than with slow list
presentation

Carneiro, Fernandez,
and Dias (2009)

4-adult 3 Portuguese
DRM lists with
Easy versus
hard to
identify
themes

Age increases in false recognition and false recall. Easy to
identify themes increase false memory in children and
adolescents but decrease it in adults

Carneiro et al. (2007) 3-adult 2 Portuguese
DRM lists

Age increases in false recognition and false recall for lists
that were separately normed for each age level. Age
increases in false memory for both short and long lists

(continued on next page)

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 233

Table 1 (continued)

Articles Age span # Exps.
reported
in article
Memory tests Key results

Ceci et al. (2007) 4–9 2 Memory for
common
objects from a
picture story

Following misinformation (suggestions that certain
objects were in the story that were not), there were age
increases in false memory for objects whose meanings
were better understood by older than younger children

Connolly and Price
(2006)

4–7 1 Memory for
the events of
play sessions

Following misinformation (suggestions about play
activities that children did not participate in), there were
age increases in false recall for suggested activities
whose gist has been repeatedly instantiated in multiple
play sessions

Dewhurst and
Robinson (2004)

5–11 1 DRM lists Age increases in semantic false recall but age decreases
in phonological false recall

Dewhurst et al. (2011) 5–11 1 Standard and
phonological
DRM lists and
categorized
lists

Age increases in false recognition for standard DRM lists
and categorized lists but not for phonological DRM lists.
Test phase priming increase false memory in older but
not younger children

Dewhurst et al. (2007) 5–11 1 DRM lists
presented in
story contexts
versus
standard
presentation

Age increases in false recognition for standard
presentation but age decreases for story presentation

Fazio & Marsh, 2008 5–7 1 Memory for
false facts
embedded in
stories

Following misinformation (suggestions that false facts
were true), there were age increases in false recall of
false facts

Fernandez-Dols et al.
(2008)

6–9 3 Memory for
videos and
slides and
negative
emotional
expressions

Following misinformation (suggestions that faces of
people displaying negative emotion had been seen that
had not been seen), there were age increases in false
memory for unseen emotional expressions

Ghetti, Qin, and
Goodman (2002)

5-adult 1 Short DRM
lists only

No age changes in false recall or false recognition

Holliday et al. (2008) 7–15 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recall. Gist cuing increased false
recall at all age levels except age 15. List repetition
reduced false memory at all age levels

Holliday et al. (2011) 7–11 1 DRM list
presented as
word
fragments
versus
standard

Ages increases in false recognition with standard
presentation but age decreases with fragment
presentation. False memory higher following

3

recognition tests than after the first test

Holliday and Weekes
(2006)

8–13 1 Standard
versus
phonological
DRM lists

Age increases in false recognition for standard lists but
age decreases for phonological lists

Howe et al. (2004) 5–12 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
maltreated, low-SES, and normal-SES children. False
memory levels were not affected by maltreatment or SES

Howe (2005) 5-adult 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recall. Directed forgetting
instructions decreased false memory in children but not
in adults

234 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Table 1 (continued)
Articles Age span # Exps.
reported
in article
Memory tests Key results

Howe (2006) 5–11 3 DRM and
categorized
lists

Age increases in false recall for word lists but not for
picture lists. Equal age increases for DRM and
categorized lists

Howe (2007) 8–13 1 Standard
versus
emotional
DRM lists

Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
standard and emotional lists. Greater age increases for
emotional lists

Howe (2008) 5–11 4 DRM lists Age increases in false recall memory for word lists, for
some lists of photographs, but not lists of line drawings

Howe et al. (2007) 6–adult 1 DRM lists
(English and
French)

Age increases in false recognition and false recall in
bilingual subjects. Higher false recall in children when
presentation and test languages match. Higher false
recall in adults when presentation and test languages
mismatch. Higher false recognition at all age levels when
presentation and test languages mismatch

Howe, Wimmer,
Gagnon, and
Plumpton (2009)

5-adult 3 DRM lists Age increases in false recall. Age increases are amplified
when forward or backward associative strength is
increased

Howe and Wilkinson
(2011)

7–11 1 DRM lists
presented in
story contexts
versus
standard
presentation

Age increases in false recall, with smaller increases for
story presentation than for standard presentation

Khanna and Cortese
(2009)

8-adult 2 Standard
versus
phonological
DRM lists

Age increases in false recall for visually presented
standard lists. No age increases for orally presented
standard lists or for phonological lists

Knott et al. (2011) 5-adult 3 DRM lists
categorized
lists

Age increases in false recall. Directed forgetting
instructions increased false memory in adults but not in
children. Presenting list words as retrieval cues on recall
tests reduced false memory

Lampinen et al. (2006) 6-adult 2 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition for blocked list
presentation but not for random presentation.

Gist cuing

increased false memory in children but not in adults

Lyons et al. (2010) 6-adult 1 Memory for
causal
Inferences
from stories

Age increases in false memory for backward causal
relations that were not presented in stories

Metzger et al. (2008) 7-adult 3 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
child- and adult-normed lists

Odegard et al. (2008) 11-adult 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition when incorrect DRM
list themes were cued but not when correct themes were
cued. Two gist components of false memory (phantom
recollection and familiarity) and one verbatim
component (recollection rejection) were separated with
the conjoint recognition model

Odegard et al. (2009) 5–12 1 Memory of the
events of
thematic
birthday
parties

Following theme-consistent misinformation
(suggestions that events that did not happen but were
consistent with a birthday party theme had happened),
there were age increases in false recognition of
suggested events

(continued on next page)

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 235

Table 1 (continued)
Articles Age span # Exps.
reported
in article
Memory tests Key results

Otgaar and Smeets
(2010)

8-adult 2 Dutch DRM
lists

Age increases in false recall. Larger age increases when
lists were presented under a survival scenario, rather
than a moving scenario

Otgaar, Peters, and
Howe (2012)

7-adult Standard
versus
emotional
Dutch DRM
lists

Age increases in false recall between 7 and 11 but not
between 11 and adult. Divided attention increased
adults’ false memories but decreased children’s.
Emotional lists decreased false memory at all age levels

Paz-Alonso, Ghetti,
Donohue, Goodman,
and Bunge (2008)

8-adult 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition. fMRI scans revealed
age increases in false memory were associated with age
changes in activation in the medial temporal lobes and
the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex

Principe et al. (2008) 3–6 1 Memory for
real-life events
(a magic act)

Following misinformation (rumor mongering by another
child), there were age increases in false memory for
events that involved causal inferences

Ross et al. (2006) 5–11 1 Memory for
videos of a
theft

Following misinformation (videos showing an innocent
bystander as well as the culprit), there were age
increases in false eyewitness identification of the
innocent bystander as the culprit

Sloutsky and Fisher
(2004a)

5-adult 1 Memory for
categorized
photographs

False recognition of unpresented animal exemplars
increased with age when subjects were given a verbal
label for the animal category

Sloutsky and Fisher
(2004b)

5-adult 4 Memory for
categorized
photographs

False recognition of unpresented animal exemplars of an
animal increase with age when subjects were given a
verbal label for the animal category

Sugrue and Hayne
(2006)

5-adult 1 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition and false recall for
standard lists but not for short lists

Sugrue, Strange, and
Hayne (2009)

10-adult Short versus
long DRM lists

No age trends in false recall

Verkoeijen and
Bouwmeester (in
press)

8-adult Dutch DRM
lists

False recognition and false recall increased with age.
Latent class analysis showed that level of false memory
depended on level of gist processing and individual
differences in gist processing were better predictors of
false memory than differences in age

Weekes et al. (2007) 9–11 1 Standard
versus
phonological
DRM

Lower levels of false recognition and false recall for
children with low semantic processing ability on
standard lists but not on phonological lists

Wilburn and Feeney
(2008)

5-adult 2 Memory for
multiple
photographs
of the same
type

False recognition of unpresented animal exemplars
increased with age when subjects were given a verbal
label for the animal category

Wimmer and Howe
(2011)

7-adult 2 DRM lists Age increases in false recognition. Presenting lists under
divided attention conditions or deep processing
instructions affected children’s false memories more
than adults

236 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

manipulations) or by providing prosthetics for younger subjects’ weaker gist memory abilities (suffi-
ciency manipulations). It will be seen that both types of manipulations have the predicted effects, but
we are getting ahead of our story.

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 237

Developmental reversals in the DRM illusion

By itself, the DRM illusion provides an impressive existence proof that semantic false memories can
increase dramatically between early childhood and young adulthood. Remember that in this proce-
dure, subjects are exposed to short lists of words (or, sometimes, pictures; Israel & Schacter, 1997),
all of which are forward associates of a missing word that serves as a false memory item on recogni-
tion or recall tests. Remember, too, that this procedure produces quite high levels of false memory in
adults, so that the question is whether it produces even higher levels in children, as would have been
expected several years ago, or whether it produces lower levels. It is convenient to divide developmen-
tal studies of the DRM illusion into two epochs, 2002–2005 and 2006–present. Because developmental
reversal findings are counterintuitive, it is natural to be skeptical for a time about initial findings of
that sort. 2002–2005 is that period. It begins with a report of three experiments in which the DRM
illusion was found to increase between age five and young adulthood and net memory accuracy
was found to decline, and continues with four further articles in which age increases in the illusion
were repeatedly replicated and age increases in false memory for categorized materials were also de-
tected. Once researchers had convinced themselves that the developmental reversal pattern was real,
the next question was to investigate its limitations and to ask, in particular, whether it was due to
uninteresting methodological variables (such as linguistic differences between children and adults).
That period is 2006 to the present, in which a number of potential limiting factors have been investi-
gated, and along the way, 30 more articles have been published in which false memories were found
to increase with age.

2002–2005
Brainerd et al. (2002) reported three experiments in which the recall and recognition versions of

the DRM illusion were studied in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds and in young adults. In the first experiment,
5-year-olds listened to 10 such lists, attempting to recall each immediately after it was presented. The
rate of false recall of critical distractors such as anger, chair, doctor, sweet, and so on was only 6%. This
experiment was replicated point-for-point in a second one, except that (a) 7-year-olds as well as 5-
year-olds participated, (b) the number of DRM lists was increased to 16, and (c) both strong and weak
DRM lists were administered. Concerning c, in adults, strong lists are ones that produce very high lev-
els of false recall and false recognition of their critical distractors, such as the ones that we have been
using as examples, whereas weak lists are ones that produce much lower error rates, such as the lists
for the critical distractors cottage, king, long, and trouble. However, the children in this experiment, like
those in the first, simply displayed near-floor levels of false recall (M = 7%), and false recall did not dif-
fer between the two age levels, though true recall increased from 31% in 5-year-olds to 38% in 7-year-
olds. An especially instructive result of both experiments is that the nature of the items that the chil-
dren falsely recalled was radically different than in adults. Adults’ errors are of two predominant sorts.
Most errors are critical distractors (e.g., chair), while the remaining ones are overwhelmingly words
that, like critical distractors, share meaning with list words (e.g., bookcase, TV); that is, false recall is
almost wholly semantic. Not so with young children. Brainerd et al. found that only about half of their
errors were semantically related to list words. In their third experiment, 5-year-olds, 11-year-olds,
and young adults studied and recalled the same 16 lists as in the second experiment, and they also
responded to a recognition test after all the lists had been recalled. Across this age range, false recall
of critical distractors quintupled for strong lists and doubled for weak lists, while false recognition in-
creased by 22% for strong lists.

These basic patterns were confirmed in experiments reported in three articles that appeared two
years later. In one, Dewhurst and Robinson (2004) used a design like that of the first experiment of Bra-
inerd et al. (2002) in which 5-, 8-, and 11-year-olds listened to 5 short DRM lists (8 words), attempting
to recall each immediately after it was presented. False recall of critical distractors roughly doubled
with age. Like Brainerd et al., Dewhurst and Robinson found that children’s false recall was not domi-
nated by semantic intrusions, as adults’ is: The most common intrusions in 5-year-olds were words
that rhymed with list words, and it was not until age 11 that semantic intrusions predominated. In
the second article, Howe, Cicchetti, Toth, and Cerrito (2004) measured false recall and false recognition
of critical distractors in 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds. A novel of feature of their design was that the subject

238 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

sample included maltreated as well as non-maltreated children, the idea being to test a hypothesis that
was common in the clinical literature at the time (see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005)—namely, that maltreat-
ment makes children especially prone to false memories. Consistent with prior developmental studies
of the DRM illusion, Howe et al. found that false recall more than doubled with age, from 11% to 24%,
while false recognition increased more modestly (from 65% to 74%). The data did not confirm the
hypothesis that maltreated children are at higher risk of false memories—at least, not of the type that
are measured by the DRM illusion. In the third experiment, Brainerd, Holliday, and Reyna (2004) mea-
sured false recognition of critical distractors in 7-, 11-, and 14-year-olds, finding that such errors in-
creased with age from 41% to 68%. We mentioned that a striking fact about the DRM illusion is that
false memories of critical distractors provoke illusory vivid mental reinstatement of their prior ‘‘pre-
sentation,’’ which is called phantom recollection. Brainerd et al. found that it was these especially com-
pelling false memories that accounted for most of the developmental reversal effect; that is, false
memory not only increased with age but it was the most powerful variant that increased.

Summing up the initial group of developmental reversal studies, four general results emerged that
have been replicated in many subsequent experiments, so we list them here by way of an interim re-
port. First and most fundamentally, semantic false memory, in the form of the DRM illusion, was found
to increase, not decline, between age 5 and young adulthood, regardless of whether it was measured
via intrusions on recall tests or false alarms on recognition tests. Second, much like findings in classical
studies of the development of semantic organization in recall, false memory varied throughout this
age range—rather than, as is often the case in memory development, only varying between early child-
hood and early adolescence. In short, the ontogenetic picture for the DRM illusion is one of slow mat-
uration. Third, the picture is somewhat different for recall than for recognition. Although both increase
with age, false recall seems to be virtually at-floor in early childhood and not to begin moving upward
until after age 7, whereas false recognition is above-floor from the start. Fourth, examination of false
recall, in particular, reveals just how different memory distortion processes are in children versus
adults. In adults, virtually all recall errors are semantic, in that they share meaning with words pre-
sented on study lists (Payne et al., 1996). In young children, however, most errors are nonsemantic,
consisting of items that appeared on previously studied lists (Brainerd et al., 2002) or items that sound
like items on just-studied lists (Dewhurst & Robinson, 2004).

2006–Present
It can be seen in Table 1 that since 2005, many articles have appeared in which the DRM illusion

produced the developmental reversal pattern. As in earlier studies, developmental reversals have been
detected with both recognition and recall. Glancing at the last two columns of Table 1, which report
methodological details and key results, it can be seen that these more recent studies have broadened
the empirical base in key respects. For instance, developmental reversals have been confirmed in lan-
guages other than English—specifically, Dutch (Bouwmeester & Verkoeijen, 2010), French (e.g., Howe,
Gagnon, & Thouas, 2007), and Potuguese (e.g., Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandez, & Esteves, 2007). In
the remainder of this section, we discuss two other noteworthy ways in which the developmental
reversal pattern has been broadened.

Perhaps the most important one is that a major methodological explanation of why the DRM illu-
sion increases with age has been ruled out: word comprehension. Brainerd et al. (2002) noted that
although the critical distractors that are used to generate DRM lists are familiar words, some of the
words on the lists themselves (e.g., stethoscope on the doctor list) might be too unfamiliar to children
for them to be able to make the semantic connections that foment false memories, which means that
developmental reversals might be rather uninteresting consequences of age differences in word com-
prehension. Brainerd et al. rejected this explanation on two grounds. First, they reported that very few
words on DRM lists could be considered even moderately unfamiliar. They examined the words’ famil-
iarity scores on the Toglia and Battig (1978) norms—where familiarity is rated on a 1 (lowest) to 7
(highest) scale—and found that the average level of familiarity, 6.23, was very high. Second, Brainerd
et al. separated the lists that were administered to their subjects into ones that contained only very
familiar words versus ones that contained one or more moderately unfamiliar words and then com-
pared developmental trends for the two groups of lists. Developmental reversals did not differ in mag-
nitude for the two groups.

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 239

However, other investigators—notably, Anastasi, Lewis, and Quinlan (2008), Carneiro et al. (2007),
and Metzger et al. (2008)—argued that developmental reversals might still be due to differences in
word knowledge of a subtler variety. These researchers pointed out that the DRM illusion relies on
word lists that are generated from adult word association norms. They hypothesized that child
norms—the words that come to children’s minds when they are cued with words such as anger, chair,
doctor, sweet, and so forth—could be quite different than the words that come to adults’ minds. If so,
that could explain the lower levels of false recall and false recognition in children, and importantly,
age increases in false memory might disappear and the standard age decline trend might be restored
if DRM lists were constructed from child association norms. This hypothesis has now been evaluated
in multiple ways and disconfirmed in each instance. The developmental reversal pattern is therefore
not due to administering adult-normed lists to children.

The first experiment to demonstrate this, though it was not the first to be published, was by Metz-
ger et al. (2008). First, these authors presented some of the critical distractors for adult DRM lists to
children, asking them to state words that came to mind. The resulting free associates were then used
to construct a set of ‘‘child appropriate’’ DRM lists. Second, a developmental DRM study was con-
ducted in which those lists were administered to 7- and 10-year-olds and adults. Adult-normed lists
were also administered to the same age levels. With adult-normed lists, it was again found that false
recall increased with age (from 2% to 16%) and so did false recognition (from 23% to 72%). However,
contrary to the hypothesis that these age increases are due to developmental differences in word com-
prehension, the same pattern was obtained with child-normed lists, with false recall increasing from
1% to 13% and false recognition increasing 28% to 46%.

An even more elaborate test of the same hypothesis was conducted by Carneiro et al. (2007). These
authors, like Metzger et al. (2008), created child-normed DRM lists (in Portuguese) by first generating
child association norms for 16 critical distractors, but Carneiro et al. (2007) generated those norms sep-
arately for four different age levels—4-, 7-, 12-, and 24-year-olds. This allowed them to construct four
different age-appropriate versions of each of the 16 lists, one for each age level. Then, in a developmen-
tal study, subjects at each age level were exposed to the specific lists that had been generated by sub-
jects of their age. These more elaborate controls for word comprehension produced the same key
findings as Metzger et al. reported—explicitly, that contrary to the word comprehension hypothesis,
there was no evidence that false recall and false recognition of critical distractors decreased with age
and, instead, the developmental reversal pattern was still present. That pattern was less robust than
in prior studies in that age increases in false recall and false recognition were only reliable between
the ages of 4 and 7. Because age increases were less robust, some might say that although developmen-
tal reversals cannot be entirely due to developmental differences in word comprehension, such differ-
ences amplify developmental reversals. However, that conclusion is not supported by Carneiro et al.’s
data. Their less robust age trends were probably due to a restricted range problem among their older
subjects. With English DRM lists, as mentioned, adults show very high levels of false recall and false
recognition, but Carneiro et al.’s Portuguese lists, adults did not. Thus, the lists that they used did
not provide the same statistical power to detect increases at later age levels that English lists provide.

Anastasi et al. (2008) conducted a study that was similar to Metzger et al.’s (2008) in that they con-
structed a single set of child-appropriate DRM lists by generating a single set of child association
norms using 12 critical distractors from adult DRM lists. Six of the child-normed lists and six adult-
normed lists were then administered to 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and a group of young adults, with
subjects responding to a free recall test immediately following each list and then responding to a rec-
ognition test for all 12 lists at the end of the experiment. Remember, here, that the word comprehen-
sion hypothesis predicts a List Type � Age Trend interaction such that developmental reversals will be
observed for the adult-normed lists but the standard age decline pattern will be observed for child-
normed lists. However, Anastasi et al. found developmental reversals for both types of lists. The in-
crease in false recall was from 23% to 33% with adult-normed lists and 12% to 33% with child-normed
lists, while the increase in false recognition was from 45% to 67% with adult-normed lists and from
36% to 53% with child-normed lists.

The second example of how recent studies have broadened the developmental reversal pattern is
concerned with alternative definitions of ‘‘development’’ that are based on measured cognitive ability
rather than chronological age. Referring again to Table 1, relevant data are reported in the articles by

240 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Brainerd, Forrest, Karibian, and Reyna (2006) and Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, and Holliday (2007). It
will be remembered that a theoretical cornerstone of developmental reversal predictions about con-
nected-meaning tasks is that the ability to extract meaning from items and to connect it across items
that share meaning evolves throughout the child-to-young adult age range. Thus, developmental
reversals should actually be tied to variations in this ability, rather than to age per se (see also, Ceci,
Papierno, & Kulkofksy, 2007). There are various ways to investigate that possibility.

One approach is to study the DRM illusion in samples of learning-disabled children versus samples
of nondisabled children who have been equated on variables other than their learning-ability classi-
fications. This is an instructive comparison because children who have been legally classified as learn-
ing-disabled must show below-average performance in a school subject (most often, language or
reading), but they cannot be below-average in psychometric intelligence. The performance of learn-
ing-disabled versus nondisabled children on memory tests has been investigated for many years,
and it is well known that learning-disabled children tend to perform poorly when such tests tap
the ability to extract and remember meaning content (as in the earlier illustrations of memory for cat-
egorized lists). This suggests that semantic processing limitations that are supposedly central to age
increases in the DRM illusion are common in learning-disabled children. This, in turn, suggests that
the DRM illusion should be weaker in learning-disabled children than nondisabled children at given
age levels. That prediction was confirmed in some research reported by Brainerd et al. (2006).

These authors administered a series of DRM lists to 7- and 11-year old children. Half the subjects at
each age level were children who had been legally classified as language- or reading-disabled and
were receiving school services for their disabilities, while the other half were nondisabled children
who were not receiving any special services and were matched on IQ. All of the children were exposed
to a total of 16 DRM lists and were asked to recall each list immediately after its presentation. In the
sample as a whole, false recall of critical distractors increased from 11% at age 7 to 24% at age 11. As
predicted, false recall was lower in learning-disabled children than in nondisabled children among 7-
year-olds (6% versus 16%) and among 11-year-olds (19% versus 30%).

Another, more precise, approach to tying the DRM illusion to developmental changes in semantic
processing ability was taken by Weekes et al. (2007). Following the above line of reasoning, these
authors predicted that the DRM illusion ought to be weaker among children who show below-average
performance on standardized tests that specifically measure their ability to understand the semantic
relations that exist between common words. For instance, that ability is the focus of tests of reading
readiness and reading comprehension. Those are the types of tests that Weekes et al. administered,
using them to construct a sample of children, half of whom displayed reduced performance. Explicitly,
Weekes et al. administered a series of DRM lists to two groups of 9- to 11-year-old children, with each
list being recalled immediately following presentation. The children in one group performed a year or
more below national age norms for these tests, but they performed at the norms for their age on tests
for nonsemantic reading abilities (e.g., phonology) and on intelligence tests. The other group of chil-
dren performed at the norms for their age on all tests. Weekes et al. found group differences that were
precisely localized within false memory: Children with low versus normal semantic processing ability
displayed the same levels of true recall, but as predicted, false recall was greatly reduced in the low
group as compared to the normal group. Another instructive feature of Weekes et al.’s research is that
this group difference was narrowly localized within semantic false memory. In addition to standard
DRM lists, Weekes et al. also administered nonsemantic analogue lists that were developed by Som-
mers and Lewis (1999). In the analogue task, the lists are composed of words (hat, rat, sat, that, cab, cot,
caught, and so on) that are all phonologically related to a familiar critical distractor (cat in this in-
stance). With such lists, there were no differences in false recall between the two groups of children,
so that the group difference that was observed with standard DRM lists was closely tied to group dif-
ferences in semantic processing.

Afterword
The developmental data base on the DRM illusion supplies an existence proof that semantic false

memory can increase substantially during childhood and adolescence, contrary to the law’s traditional
assumptions about the developmental course of memory distortion. Nearly three dozen articles have
been published, using subject samples from multiple countries and testing the DRM illusion in

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 241

languages other than English. Two well-replicated findings are: (a) False recognition and false recall of
unpresented meaning-sharing words increases between childhood and adolescence and between ado-
lescence and young adulthood, and (b) false recall is at-floor in early childhood while false recognition
is above-floor. Another result of forensic moment is that in some articles (e.g., Brainerd et al., 2002;
Metzger et al., 2008), age increases in false memory have outstripped corresponding increases in false
memory—so that net accuracy (defined as the probability of remembering a list word divided by the
probability of remembering a list word plus the probability of remembering the critical distractor)
actually declines with age.

Although experimental support for developmental reversals is massive, there is a wholly predict-
able criticism that is often voiced in forensic circles. That criticism is that data on the DRM illusion are
irrelevant to legal cases because they lack ecological validity. After all, the criticism goes, legal cases
deal with memory for complex real-life events, but the DRM illusion is a word-list task. This is a var-
iant of a hoary criticism of word-list tasks that is traditionally raised by everyday memory researchers
(see Banaji & Crowder, 1989). Although the objection seems utterly convincing to many, it is flawed in
two fundamental ways. First, note that it is in the nature of proof-by-assertion. The criticism is offered
as a self-evident proposition rather than as a conclusion that grew out of data. Rather than being
swept along by rhetoric, we need to remind ourselves that the history of science is littered with exper-
imental disconfirmations of seemingly self-evident ideas that were accepted for hundreds of years—
Galileo’s demonstration that heavy and light objects actually fall at the same rate being a familiar
illustration.

Second, when we consider whether experimental evidence can be located to support the criticism,
we find that the data are mostly on the other side of street. With respect to the DRM illusion, in par-
ticular, Gallo (2010) showed in a recent literature review that individual differences in the illusion are
reliable predictors of distortions in everyday autobiographical memory and more exotic autobiograph-
ical distortions, including recollections of living past lives and being abducted by aliens and adult
recovered memories of previously unremembered childhood abuse. Further, in the social psychology
literature, the DRM illusion has been found to predict false memories of complex social situations (e.g.,
Garcia-Marques, Ferreira, Nunes, Garrido, & Garcia-Marques, 2010). In short, the above claim, seduc-
tive though it may be, is simply wrong empirically; there are ample data connecting the DRM illusion
to distortion of memory for complex, real-world experiences.

It is important to add that the overriding objection to word list data, which the ecological validity
criticism of the DRM illusion devolved from, is also wrong empirically. At a general level, as Banaji and
Crowder (1989) and many others before us have commented, just about every basic principle of hu-
man memory—laws that are routinely applied in courtrooms, clinics, and classrooms—was discovered
with word-list tasks (e.g., the forgetting function, reminiscence, encoding specificity, massed versus
distributed practice, proactive and retroactive interference, short-term memory capacity, serial posi-
tion curves). If such tasks are irrelevant to memory for complex real-life events, why have they gen-
erated general laws of human memory? At a specific level, performance on word-list tasks has been
repeatedly tied to a variety of clinical conditions in which memory distortion is an important concom-
itant or even the prime presenting symptom. The two most common forms of neurocognitive impair-
ment in older adults, Alzheimer’s dementia and its precursor condition, mild cognitive impairment,
are cases in point. Although a variety of neuropsychological tests, medical tests, and everyday func-
tioning information are used to diagnose these conditions, the best single predictor of such diagnoses
is simple recall of word lists (see Petersen, 2004). Likewise, in young adults, simple recall of word lists
differentiates individuals with schizo-typic symptoms, who are at risk of developing schizophrenia,
from individuals who are not at risk (Brainerd, Reyna, & Howe, 2009). As a third example, memory dis-
tortion is a characteristic of various emotional disturbances, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, so
that it is essential to secure objective measurements of emotional reactions to stimuli in individuals
with such conditions. Word lists provide a convenient, clinically useful technique for obtaining those
measurements because it is has been found that they produce emotional reactions that parallel those
that are produced by real-life events and autobiographical memories (Rubin & Talacrico, 2009). Empir-
ical demonstrations of this ilk could be multiplied indefinitely, and we will consider another one later,
when we take up developmental reversals in emotional false memory.

242 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Developmental reversals in false memory for categorized materials

In one of the early DRM articles, Brainerd et al. (2004) also reported an experiment on age trends in
false memory for categorized materials. The object was to generalize DRM developmental reversals by
seeking the same pattern with a different connected-meaning paradigm that had the properties that,
according to FTT, foment developmental reversals. In this alternative procedure, meaning connections
are established via taxonomic relations rather than norms of word association and false memory is
measured via intrusions and false alarms for unpresented events that are taxonomically related to pre-
sented events. The most common version of this procedure is a word-list task in which subjects are
exposed to a short list consisting of exemplars of a single taxonomic category (e.g., hand, nose, neck,
mouth, stomach, knee, heart, brain, chest, shoulder, toe, leg, thigh, ankle, face) or to a longer list composed
of several exemplars of each of a small number of categories (say, 8 exemplars apiece from the animal,
clothing, fruit, and furniture categories). With either type list, there will be several familiar exemplars
that were omitted that can serve as false memory items; for instance, ear, eye, finger, and foot for the
body part list.

Brainerd et al. (2004) exposed 5- and 11-year-old children to three lists of category exemplars (e.g.,
animal names, clothing names, and color names) followed by a recognition test on which the pre-
sented exemplars of each category, unpresented exemplars of each category, and exemplars of
unstudied categories were all tested. The middle group were the false memory items, naturally. In
all, there were three cycles of three categorized lists followed by a recognition test, for a total of nine
categorized lists. There was a development reversal effect: False recognition of unpresented exemplars
of studied categories increased by more than 40% between the ages of 5 and 11.

Shortly thereafter, Howe (2006) extended this finding to false recall of unpresented category exem-
plars. In his research, 5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds were exposed to 8 14-item lists, with each being com-
posed of exemplars of a single taxonomic category. From each of these lists, Howe omitted the most
frequently mentioned exemplar of that category and designated it as the critical distractor. After lis-
tening to each list, children participated in a 30 s distractor activity, to empty short-term memory, and
were then told to recall as many items from the list as possible. Howe found that false recall of critical
distractors doubled over this age range, increasing from 16% to 32%.

Sloutsky and Fisher (2004a) and Fisher and Sloutsky (2005) implemented a procedure that is dif-
ferent from anything we have considered so far, but they obtained the same developmental reversal
pattern. As with categorized word lists, the target materials were all exemplars of a single taxonomic
category, but those targets were so physically similar as to make it exceptionally difficult for subjects
of any age to use verbatim retrieval to reject unpresented exemplars of the category. More specifically,
the materials consisted of several color photographs of each of three types of animals (e.g., several pic-
tures of bears, several pictures of birds, and several pictures of cats). When the pictures were pre-
sented for viewing, those from one of the categories (e.g., cats) were tagged with a meaningless
verbal cue (‘‘has beta cells’’) that differentiated exemplars of that category from exemplars of the other
two categories. Later, a recognition test was administered that contained presented pictures from each
category, unpresented pictures from the tagged category, and unpresented pictures of animals from
unpresented categories (e.g., squirrels), with the second group of pictures being the false memory
items. In an initial developmental study (Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004), this task was administered to a
sample of 5-year-olds and a sample of young adults, and false memory was found to increase dramat-
ically with age: False alarms to unpresented pictures from studied categories increased from 41% to
76% while hits to presented pictures only rose from 72% to 83% – so that like some developmental
DRM studies, net memory accuracy on this task declined between early childhood and young adulthood.

These patterns were replicated in a more extensive developmental study that used the same task
but that included subjects from other age levels—explicitly, 7- and 11-year-olds—as well as 5-year-
olds and young adults. Across these four age levels, false alarms to unpresented pictures from studied
categories increased from 40% to 45% to 59% to 74%. Thus, the developmental reversal trend was most
marked during later childhood and adolescence, which is also the age range during which age
increases in the semantic organization of memory are most marked (Brainerd & Reyna, 2004, 2005).
Hits to presented pictures increased more modestly over this age range, from 70% to 81%, so that
net memory accuracy once again declined between early childhood and young adulthood. Thus, when

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 243

developmental findings from this paradigm are added to findings from some earlier DRM studies (e.g.,
Brainerd et al., 2002; Metzger et al., 2008), it is clear that not only can developmental reversals be con-
sistently obtained under the theoretically-specified conditions that we sketched earlier, but those
reversals can be so robust that they swamp age increases in true memory, leading to declines in
net accuracy.

Returning again to Table 1, it can be seen that since the above four articles appeared, four others
have been published in which age increases in false memory were detected for unpresented exemplars
of studied categories. Categorized word lists were used in three of the articles (Brainerd & Reyna,
2007; Dewhurst, Howe, Berry, & Knott, 2011; Knott, Howe, Wimmer, & Dewhurst, 2011), whereas
the Sloutsky–Fisher picture paradigm was used in the remaining one (Wilburn & Feeney, 2008). In
one of the word list experiments (Brainerd & Reyna, 2007), the false alarm rate for unpresented exem-
plars of studied categories increased form 25% to 67% between the ages of 6 and 14, while the hit rate
for presented targets only increased from 49% to 82%. In the Wilburn and Feeney (2008) article, these
authors, like Sloutsky and Fisher (2004a) and Fisher and Sloutsky (2005), found that age increases in
false memory were greater than increases in true memory—so that once again, net memory accuracy
declined between early childhood and young adulthood.

In sum, studies of false memory for categorized materials have generalized the developmental
reversal pattern that was first detected with the DRM illusion in some fundamental ways. The most
obvious one is that robust developmental reversals can easily be obtained with very different types
of materials, ones that are generated from category norms rather than association norms and that in-
clude realistic pictures as well as word lists. Another important generalization concerns net develop-
mental reductions in memory accuracy; that is, reductions in the proportion of reported items that are
in fact true. Some of the earlier DRM studies produced this dramatic form of the developmental rever-
sal, and now, it has been found in all of the experiments that implemented the Sloutsky–Fisher picture
methodology and in some of the experiments that used categorized word lists. The fact that net mem-
ory accuracy can decline with age is of great forensic interest because it suggests that not only are old-
er witnesses more likely to produce certain types of false memories than younger witness, but the
overall yield of accurate information (the difference between true and false information) can be lower
in older witnesses. It is difficult to overstate the forensic significance of this result.

Developmental reversals in false memory for complex and forensic events

In our discussion of DRM studies, we aired the familiar criticism that the results of such studies are
irrelevant to the reliability of testimony because word-lists lack ecological validity when it comes to
the complex, real-world experiences that figure in testimony. We noted that although that criticism
strikes many as incisive, it is misguided, for two reasons. First, it is a rhetorical flourish, not an empir-
ical generalization growing out of controlled experimentation that compared false memory for more
complex events to false memory word lists and demonstrated that they do, indeed, produce qualita-
tively different patterns. Second, this criticism has been disconfirmed by data showing (a) that the
DRM task predicts false memory for various complex, real-life events, including ones that are charac-
teristic of clinical conditions and (b) that other types of word-list tasks do likewise.

Although data are the final arbiter of truth in science, the history of psychology teaches us that
hypotheses with strong rhetorical appeal have a habit of surviving mountains of disconfirmatory re-
sults. Therefore, in this section, we answer the ecological validity criticism directly by considering
developmental reversal studies of false memory for complex events, including events of obvious
forensic relevance, using paradigms that have often been discussed in expert testimony as supporting
the traditional assumption that false memory declines with age. The denouement is that when the
theoretical conditions that favor developmental reversals are satisfied (i.e., connect-meaning para-
digms), it is not just word lists (or picture lists in the case of the Sloutsky–Fisher paradigm) that pro-
duce such reversals; so do complex events. In Table 1, eight articles of that type are listed, which can
be subdivided into two groups of articles that we review separately below: three in which the mea-
sured false memories were spontaneous (Fernandez-Dols, Carrera, Barchard, & Gacitua, 2008; Lyons,
Ghetti, & Cornoldi, 2010; Odegard, Cooper, Lampinen, Reyna, & Brainerd, 2009) and five in which they
were generated by post-event misinformation (Ceci et al., 2007; Connolly & Price, 2006; Fazio &

244 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Marsh, 2008; Principe, Guiliano, & Root, 2008; Ross et al., 2006). All of these studies were designed in
the wake of the early word-list studies that detected developmental reversals and adopted as one of
their objectives to determine whether such reversals also occur for complex events. Thus, they provide
direct tests of the ecological validity criticism.

Developmental reversals in spontaneous false memories

The first study of this sort was reported by Fernandez-Dols et al. in 2008, with children in the 6–9
age range. In an initial pair of experiments with adults, the authors validated a procedure for studying
false memory for a form of information that is often central in legal cases: people’s emotions. In this
procedure, subjects were shown either videos or realistic slide sequences containing multiple charac-
ters, some of whom were adults and some of whom were children. The characters’ faces exhibited
either happy expressions or fearful expressions, the authors’ objective being to create gist memories
of happiness and gist memories of fearfulness. On later recognition tests, subjects viewed further pic-
tures of the faces of the same characters. Some of the pictures had been seen before and some had not,
but all the characters were the same as before. Among the previously unseen pictures, the false-mem-
ory items were ones in which the characters’ faces displayed the same type of emotion as they had
displayed before. This procedure yielded an impressive false memory effect in adults. When it was
administered to children, there was a clear developmental reversal: The percentage of subjects who
falsely recognized new facial expressions that preserved emotional gist of videos and slide sequences
increased from 75% (age 6–7) to 90% (age 8–9) to 96% (adults).

In the remaining two articles, false memories for scripted events from real life were investigated in
children of different ages. In the Lyons et al. (2010) experiment, subjects from five age levels (6-, 7-, 9-,
and 10-year-olds, plus young adults) were exposed to picture stories of events from four familiar the-
matic situations (eating at a restaurant, getting up in the morning, grocery shopping, and attending a
class at school). The stories were constructed in such a way that certain events were depicted (e.g., a pile
of oranges scattered on the floor of the vegetable section of a grocery store) that must have been caused
by another event (e.g., a shopper taking an orange from the bottom of the pile rather than from the top),
but that causal event was not depicted in any of the pictures. Later, subjects received a picture recogni-
tion test containing both old and new pictures and were asked to identify the old pictures. Among the
new pictures, the false-memory items were ones that depicted the previously unseen causal events. The
false alarm rate for these unseen causal events increased from near-floor to roughly 25% in 9-year-olds
and remained constant thereafter. Also, when subjects were asked to rate their confidence in the accu-
racy of these false alarms, confidence increased steadily throughout the 6 to young adult age range.

In the final study, by Odegard et al. (2009), the false memories that were measured were for real-
life events in which children (5- to 12-year-olds) directly participated. Those events consisted of par-
ticipation in birthday parties. To establish the conditions for formation of the types of gist memories
that produce developmental reversals, children (a) attended a series of four birthday parties that were
spaced over four consecutive days, and (b) each party revolved around a familiar theme (either the
birthday of characters from the Sponge Bob Square Pants television program or of characters from
the Harry Potter novels). During each party, children participated in some activities that were directly
related to the party’s theme and in some unrelated activities as well. Ten days after the fourth party,
children received a forensic-style investigative interview about party events, using the well-known
NICHD protocol (e.g., Lamb, Orbach, Hershkowitz, Esplin, & Horowitz, 2007; Poole & Lamb, 1998).
These interviews included tests for the types of events that have produced developmental reversals
in studies that we have reviewed so far (i.e., ones that preserved the themes of birthday parties), as
well as the types of events that have not been found to produce developmental reversals (i.e., ones
that were unrelated to party themes). Between the ages of 5 and 12, false memory for gist-consistent
events increased reliably, but false memory for unrelated events did not.

Developmental reversals in implanted false memories

The Loftus (1975) misinformation paradigm occupies a special place in developmental research on
the reliability of child witnesses’ memories. The forensic relevance of the procedure is undeniable

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 245

because it is an experimental analogue of the suggestive, leading lines of questioning that are so prom-
inent in criminal investigation and interrogation, lawyerly questioning of witnesses, and even in
everyday conversations about crimes. Consequently, beginning in the 1980s, the misinformation pro-
cedure has been extensively used in developmental research. Indeed, it is the principal source of data
supporting the traditional developmental decline assumption and, hence, the principal from of scien-
tific evidence on which expert testimony favoring that assumption has been based (McAuliff & Kovera,
2007). Ceci et al. (1987) were the first to report a series of controlled experiments showing that sus-
ceptibility to memory suggestion for everyday events decreased between early childhood and young
adulthood. Since then, dozens of follow-up studies, conducted by many researchers in multiple coun-
tries and languages, have replicated that pattern and isolated key variables that influence it, such as
delay between original events and misinformation, delay between misinformation and memory test-
ing, plausibility of misinformation, credibility of misinformation sources, and so on. The early portion
of this literature was summarized in an influential review by Ceci and Bruck (1993), and later work has
been summarized in other reviews (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2005; Goodman, 2006; Goodman & Schaaf,
1997; Holliday et al., 2002; Quas et al., 1997; Reyna et al., 2007).

Despite the massive evidence of age declines in false memories that are implanted with the misin-
formation paradigm, it is natural to wonder whether the developmental reversal pattern could also be
produced if this paradigm were to be modified to meet the theoretical conditions that were sketched
earlier; that is, modified to be a connected-meaning task in which it is hard for developmental in-
creases in verbatim memory to neutralize parallel increases in gist-based false memory. It turns out
that the answer is yes. Connolly and Price (2006) were the first to publish such a demonstration. In
order to create a connected-meaning variant of the paradigm, one group of subjects (preschoolers
and first graders) participated in a single play session while a second group participated in four play
sessions that established connected meaning relations. During the first session in the connect-mean-
ing condition, each child performed eight target activities that were accompanied by a critical detail,
such as a white object. When those activities were repeated in each of the next three sessions, they
were accompanied by new critical details that preserved the gist of prior details (e.g., brown, blue,
and yellow versions of the same object). The final play session was followed by a misinformation phase
that focused on these critical details and suggested that other details had been experienced that pre-
served the gist of the details that had actually been experienced (e.g., a black version of the white/
brown/blue/yellow detail). A day after the misinformation phase, a series of free and cued recall tests
for the four play sessions were administered. In both the control and connected-meaning conditions,
children exhibited reliable false recall of suggested details. However, in the connected-meaning con-
dition, those errors tripled with age on free recall tests and quadrupled with age on cued recall tests.
Thus, the standard developmental decline pattern for implanted false memories was reversed by sim-
ply modifying the misinformation paradigm to satisfy the theoretical conditions for age increases in
false memory.

The next experiment to demonstrate the same thing was published 3 months later by Ross et al.
(2006) and focused on a question of great forensic importance: the suggestibility of witnesses’ mem-
ories of the faces of criminal suspects. Similar to the reasoning behind Connolly and Price’s (2006) re-
search, Ross et al. thought that the tendency to process any salient semantic relations between culprits
and innocent bystanders—such as their age, ethnicity, or gender—should increase substantially with
development (on analogy to increases in the tendency to process taxonomic relations in word-list
tasks). On that basis, they conjectured that suggestion-induced falsely identifications of innocent
bystanders should exhibit developmental reversals when culprits and bystanders shared such seman-
tic relations. To determine if that was so, they presented a video of a theft of money in a cafeteria to 5-,
7-, 9, and 11-year-old children. Among other characters, the video contained a culprit and a bystander
of the same age/ethnicity/gender. Later, the children received an eyewitness identification test, con-
sisting of five photographs. The photographs were of the innocent bystander and four people who
were not present in the video. One of the testing conditions involved misinformation to the effect that
the thief was definitely present among the photographs. In that condition, the tendency to falsely
identify the innocent bystander as the thief increased dramatically with age, from 18% in 5-yearolds
to 40% in 7-year-olds to 47% in 9-year-olds to 64% in 11-year-olds.

246 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

A year later, Ceci et al. (2007) reported the next misinformation study in which connected meaning
produced a developmental reversal effect. The important advance in this research is that the authors
actively manipulated age differences in the tendency to store gist memories of meaning content via a
semantic distance procedure. In that procedure, the semantic distances between 22 common objects
(e.g., a lemon, an orange, a glass of milk, a cow) were separately determined for a group of 4-year-olds
and a group of 9-year-olds. That was done by presenting pictures of the objects in groups of three, des-
ignating one picture as the focal object, and asking children to judge which of the remaining two pic-
tures was more similar to the focal object. Using this procedure, it was possible to identify groups of
objects that were more similar to older children than to younger ones—the idea being that if older and
young children were presented with pictures of those objects, older children would be more likely to
connect the gist and, therefore, would be more susceptible to misinformation about unpresented pic-
tures that share that gist. That is what Ceci et al. found, using a standard misinformation experiment in
which (a) a picture story was presented to children that contained eight of the objects whose semantic
distances had been rated, (b) children were then exposed to a misinformation phase suggesting that
certain objects were presented in the story that were not, and finally, (c) children responded to a rec-
ognition test consisting of target objects that appeared in the story, distractor objects for which they
had received misinformation, and distractor objects for which they had not received misinformation.
The key prediction was that susceptibility to misinformation would increase with age when misin-
formed objects were more closely connected in meaning for older children than for younger ones. This
is exactly the pattern that was obtained, with false alarm rates for such objects doubling between the
ages of 4 and 9.

The next misinformation experiment to produce developmental reversals was reported by Fazio
and Marsh (2008). To begin, Fazio and Marsh, in prior research with adults, had developed a procedure
in which subjects were given false suggestions about real-world ‘‘facts,’’ concerning which they pre-
sumably possessed conflicting knowledge, with the false ‘‘facts’’ being cleverly embedded in stories
about familiar events, such as wedding anniversaries and the Civil War. Afterwards, they responded
to cued recall tests about events in the stories. After reading such a suggestive story only twice,
40% of young adults recalled false facts that conflicted with their own knowledge. Based on FTT’s anal-
ysis of developmental reversals, Fazio and Marsh reasoned that if susceptibility to suggestion depends
on forming strong gist memories by connecting meaning across different events, these false memories
ought to increase with age. Note that this provides a very strong test of the underlying theoretical
ideas: Common sense would say that older subjects should be less susceptible to such misinformation
because they are more likely than younger subjects to possess the factual knowledge that is required
to resist misinformation (e.g., that Stonewall Jackson was a Confederate general, not a Union general).
However, the data were in line with theoretical prediction rather than common sense in that recall of
false suggested ‘‘facts’’ increased from 6% in 5-year-olds to 13% in 7-year-olds and, as mentioned, to
40% in young adults.

The last article in this group is by Principe et al. (2008), and it involved another form of misinfor-
mation that is of high forensic interest: rumor mongering. A standard feature of criminal cases, once
they become public, is that rumors circulate back and forth among witnesses, other parties to the
crimes, their family members, friends and acquaintances. When suspects are identified, rumor mon-
gering about their past behavior can be especially intense. A natural concern, then, one that has re-
ceived surprisingly limited attention in research, is whether the gossip and innuendo that circulate
during rumor mongering can distort witnesses’ memory for the actual details of crimes. For instance,
will witnesses remember defendants committing criminal acts that, actually, they only heard about
via rumor mongering? Principe et al. (2008) investigated such questions in children under controlled
conditions. The children in her experiment were 3- and 6-year-olds. To ensure that the experiment
was a connected-meaning task, Principe et al. studied false memories that like Lyons et al.’s (2010)
experiment, involved the causes of effects that had been directly experienced by children. In other
words, some of the events that children experienced were caused by other events that they had not
experienced, but unlike Lyons’ research, suggestive information about the causal events was provided
to children. Specifically, a visitor to the children’s classrooms performed a magic show that involved
various tricks, two of which consisted of pulling a rabbit out of a hat and producing a baked cake after
simply mixing cake ingredients in a pan. The visitor failed at both of those particular tricks. After the

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 247

magic show, rumor mongering was induced in children who had been assigned to a suggestion con-
dition by exposing them to a series of indirect hints about what might have happened to cause the hat
and cake tricks to fail. (The hints were intended to encourage the inferences that the hat trick had
failed because the rabbit had gotten loose in the classroom and that the cake trick had failed because
one of the children had eaten the cake without the magician’s knowledge.) To confirm that children in
the suggestion condition propagated rumors about why the tricks failed to control children who had
not received hints, their behavior was observed by a confederate. Finally, a week later, all the children
received a memory interview about the events of the magic show, with chief interest attaching to
whether they falsely remembered causal events that were only hinted at in the suggestion condition
and that were conveyed to control children via rumor mongering. The children in both conditions
exhibited such false memories. More important, there was an Age � Condition cross-over in false
memory. For children in the suggestion condition, who like Lyons et al.’s children, had to connect
meaning and make causal inferences to generate false memories, false memory for unseen causal
events increased substantially between age 3 and age 6. For children in the control condition, who, like
children in standard misinformation experiments, passively received suggestions via rumor monger-
ing, false memory for the same events declined with age.

Comment

Beyond the laboratory paradigms that we reviewed earlier, then, the literature on developmental
reversals also supplies direct disconfirmations of the ecological validity criticism by demonstrating
age increases in false memory for complex events. That work includes experiments that have used
forensicallies-relevant tasks whose data have long figured in expert courtroom testimony. However,
there is an important type of research that has not yet been undertaken—namely, studies linking
age increases in false memory in these tasks to age increases in the word-list paradigms that were cov-
ered earlier in this paper. We mentioned that in the adult false memory literature, there is extensive
research showing that false memory in tasks such as the DRM illusion is correlated with a variety of
complex, real-world false memories—including exotic and clinical forms (Gallo, 2010). As yet, devel-
opmental research of that ilk has not been conducted. It should be, for both theoretical and practical
reasons. On the theoretical side, there are straightforward predictions that such research would put to
the test: If, as theory assumes, the same processes are responsible for developmental reversals in both
spheres, age trends in the two types of tasks should correlate. On the practical side, it is far simpler to
design and conduct controlled experiments with laboratory paradigms such as the DRM illusion
and categorized lists than with the sorts of paradigms that we reviewed in the present section.
Consequently, future researchers’ tasks would be simplified if communality could be established
between the two domains.

Developmental reversals in emotional false memory

We continue the theme of the last section by reviewing evidence for developmental reversals in a
type of false memory that is of special forensic interest: false memory for emotional events. A shared
property of the legal cases that first drew attention to children’s false memories is that child witnesses
were attempting to remember emotionally charged events. This is true of most criminal cases, of
course. Emotional arousal was intrinsic to some of the events that child witnesses attempt to remem-
ber, such as specific abusive behaviors that they experienced or that they saw inflicted on others.
Other key events that child witnesses attempt to remember, such as the physical appearance of a cul-
prit or the time of day, are not emotionally arousing in themselves, but the accuracy of children’s
memories for those events may be influenced for good or ill by the fact that they were placed in a state
of emotional arousal by other events that were part of a crime. As emotional states are such an integral
part of memory in legal contexts, how such states affect levels of false memory is of the first impor-
tance. A current hypothesis in adult research, for which there is a good deal of recent support (Brain-
erd, Stein, et al., 2008; Goodman et al., 2011), is that emotional states, especially negatively-valenced
ones, increase the rate of false memory for information that is consistent with the semantic gist of

248 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

those emotional states. The key developmental question then becomes whether this distortive effect
decreases or increases with age.

There are two contrasting hypotheses about that. One falls out of a leading adult theory of emo-
tional memory, the affect as information hypothesis (e.g., Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Corson & Verrier,
2007; Isen, 1987; Storbeck & Clore, 2005), while the other falls out of FTT’s analysis of the growth of
gist memory (Brainerd, Holliday, Reyna, Yang, & Toglia, 2010; Goodman et al., 2011; Rivers, Reyna, &
Mills, 2008). According to the affect as information hypothesis, adults focus their processing attention
on the surface features of experience when they are in negative emotional states, as compared to
when they are in neutral or positive states. This means that negative states selectively strengthen ver-
batim memory for actual events, which should reduce false memory for gist-consistent events, relative
to neutral or positive states (Storbeck & Clore, 2005). Because verbatim memory improves between
early childhood and young adulthood, this protective effect of negative emotion should increase with
age, causing false memory to decline with age.

The opposite prediction, developmental increases in false memory for negatively-valenced experi-
ences, can be generated from FTT, and it is predicated on a distinction between two core dimensions of
such experiences, valence and arousal. Although specific emotional states (e.g., anger, fear, joy, sad-
ness) differ in a number of ways, it is well known that all such states vary along a valence dimension
(anger is more negative than joy) and an arousal dimension (sadness is less arousing than anger). Riv-
ers et al. (2008) and Brainerd Reyna, and Ceci (2008) pointed out that in FTT, valence is a conceptual
aspect of experience that is subject to the usual developmental trends in memory for semantic gist
(see also, Goodman et al., 2011). Negative valence is viewed, on analogy to familiar taxonomic rela-
tions, as a salient type of meaning connection among events. Arousal, on the other hand, is noncon-
ceptual and is viewed, on analogy to dual-task interference, as a form of noise that interferes more
with verbatim memory than with gist memory. Developmentally, then, the valence side of emotion
favors age increases in false memory, especially for negative valence, because, like other meaning rela-
tions, the ability to connect valence gist among different events increases with age. The arousal side of
emotion predicts the same because there is much more verbatim memory for it to interfere with as
development proceeds (Brainerd et al., 2010).

In developmental studies, there are ethical reservations about inducing the intense emotional
states that are associated with serious crimes. Although it may be necessary to do so to answer some
legal questions that demand answers, it seems clear that most research on this topic should imple-
ment milder forms of emotion to tie down the key effects of valence and arousal and how they vary
with age before more intense manipulations are implemented. Here, researchers have devised two
methodologies, one of which has been adopted in multiple developmental studies (see Table 1). In
one method, which is common in the adult social psychology literature (e.g., Corson & Verrier,
2007; Storbeck & Clore, 2005), subjects are placed in a positive or negative mood, then they are ex-
posed to neutral information (e.g., a prose passage from a history book), and finally, true and false
memory for the neutral information are tested. Various procedures can be used to induce moods, such
as listening to appropriate musical passages or viewing a series of pictures from the International
Affective Picture Norms (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005). [The IAPS contains many pictures
of high-arousal negative stimuli (poisonous snakes, vicious animals), high-arousal positive stimuli
(joyous faces, people water skiing), low-arousal negative stimuli (elderly people, a physician’s office),
and low-arousal positive stimuli (ballet dancers, pastoral landscapes).] The other method, which has
been used in recent developmental research, is to expose subjects to events that are inherently emo-
tional and simply measure true and false memory for those emotional events.

The particular version of the second procedure that has most often been implemented was intro-
duced by Budson et al. (2006), and it is a variant of the DRM illusion. Using the same association norms
that generate standard DRM lists, Budson et al. created a series of parallel lists whose critical distrac-
tors are negative emotional words, such as anger, cry, lie, and sick. Howe (2007) then administered
those lists, along with emotionally neutral DRM lists to samples of 5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds, and he
found on recognition tests that false alarm rates were higher for emotion critical distractors than
for neutral ones, and he found that emotional false memory, like the neutral variety, increased with
age. Emotional false memory also increased with age with recall tests, but false recall was higher
for neutral critical distractors than for emotional ones. Howe, Candel, Otgaar, Malone, and Wimmer

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 249

(2010) then reported two experiments with adults and three with 8- and 11-year-olds, in which false
recall and false recognition were measured with Budson et al.’s emotional and neutral lists. The first
two experiments replicated Howe’s earlier result that which type of list (emotional or neutral) pro-
duced more false memory flip-flopped for recognition versus recall, and the other three experiments
showed that false recall and false recognition both increased with age for emotional as well as neutral
lists. The three developmental experiments also produced important new findings because they dealt
with changes in emotional and neutral false memory over a 1-week delay, using recognition tests.
Here, a frequently studied prediction of FTT that was discussed earlier is that false memory levels drift
upward over delays of this sort because verbatim traces become inaccessible more rapidly than gist

Table 2
The Cornell/Cortland emotion lists.

Valence/arousal Property

Mean valence Mean arousal

List CD List CD

Negative/high
Cold 5.30 4.02 4.50 5.19
Hurt 2.96 1.9 5.72 5.85
Thief 3.61 2.13 5.66 6.89
Spider 4.64 3.33 5.16 5.71
Dead 4.18 1.94 4.94 5.73
Rough 5.29 4.74 4.16 5.33
Anger 3.73 2.85 7.10 7.17
Needle 4.48 3.82 4.88 5.36
Grand means 4.27 3.09 5.27 5.9

0

Positive/High
God 6.25 8.15 5.58 5.95
Baby 6.14 8.22 5.06 5.53
Love 7.10 8.72 4.82 6.4

4

Music 6.14 8.13 4.54 5.32
City 5.40 6.03 4.98 5.24
Beach 6.78 8.03 5.13 5.53
Hug 6.94 8.00 4.73 5.53
Pretty 6.29 7.75 4.99 6.03
Grand means 6.38 7.88 4.98 5.70

Negative/low
Sick 3.91 1.9 5.04 4.29
Fat 5.54 2.28 4.55 4.81
Shy 5.00 4.64 4.98 3.77
Dirt 4.85 4.17 4.39 3.76
Board 5.75 4.82 4.99 3.36
Trash 4.15 2.67 4.43 4.16
Glass 5.73 4.75 4.66 4.27
Fall 4.59 4.31 4.94 4.70
Grand means 4.94 3.69 4.75 4.14

Positive/low
Soft 5.77 7.12 4.40 4.63
Green 5.28 6.18 4.26 4.28
Nice 6.36 6.55 5.19 4.38
Sleep 6.12 7.20 3.70 2.80
Bird 6.51 7.27 4.47 3.17
Grass 6.31 6.12 4.57 4.14
Fish 6.07 6.04 5.30 4.00
River 6.25 6.85 4.42 4.51
Grand means 6.08 6.67 4.54 4.00

Note: List = the 15 words on each list, and CD = the critical distractor for each list. For the 15 list words, some of the words on
each list are not available in existing word norms for valence and arousal (Bradley & Lang, 1999; Toglia & Battig, 1978). The
tabled means for valence and arousal of list words are therefore based on the words that are available in these norms.

250 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

traces. Consistent with that notion, Howe et al. found that true memory declined but false memory
increased over the delay, for both emotional and neutral lists and for children as well as adults. More-
over, the upward drift in false memory was greater for emotional than for neutral lists, so that emo-
tional false memory was considerably higher than its neutral counterpart after a week. Age increases
in false memory for emotional as well as neutral lists continued to be present after a delay, with levels
of false recognition of critical distractors being roughly 20% higher in adults than in children.

Different results were obtained in adolescents and middle-aged adults in an experiment by Good-
man et al. (2011). Like Howe and associates’ research, these authors’ administered neutral and nega-
tive DRM lists, but they also administered positive ones, and both age levels included subjects who
were victims of child sexual abuse. Whereas Howe and associates consistently obtained higher levels
of false memory for negative lists with recognition tests but higher levels for neutral lists with recall
tests, Goodman et al. obtained higher levels of false memory for negative lists with recall tests but
higher levels for neutral lists with recognition tests. Also, whereas Howe and associates consistently
observed age increases in false memory for both negative and neutral lists, Goodman et al. obtained
a null age effects.

Using the procedures that Budson et al. (2006) introduced, the research of Howe and associates and
Goodman et al. (2011) seems to show that there are robust false memory effects for the valenced ver-
sion of the DRM illusion, that the valenced version can be more powerful than the standard version un-
der certain conditions, and that the valenced version, like its neutral counterpart, exhibits
developmental reversals. However, there are uncertainties about these findings owing to a methodo-
logical limitation of the Budson et al. procedure. We mentioned above that in order to generate clean
data on emotional false memory and how it develops, it is important to separate the effects of valence
and arousal. In the Budson et al. procedure, the two are confounded because, as Brainerd et al. (2010)
discussed, when their valenced and neutral lists are compared, the two groups of lists differ in both va-
lence (the valenced lists are more negative) and arousal (the valenced lists are more arousing). Thus, it
is impossible to know whether the emotional false memory effects that are observed for these lists are
caused by valence, arousal, or both. Also, when the relative magnitude of emotional versus neutral false
memory is found to flip–flop as a result of the type of memory test (Howe, 2007; Howe et al., 2010), it
could be that verbatim memory contributes more to one type of test than to the other.

To eliminate this valence-arousal confound, Brainerd et al. (2010) developed a new pool of 32 emo-
tional DRM lists, which are shown in Table 2. As can be seen in the first column, there are 16 negative
lists, 8 higher-arousal versus 8 lower-arousal, and 16 positive lists, 8 higher-arousal versus 8 lower-
arousal. In the second and third columns, the mean valence rating (on a 9-point scale) of the 15 list
words and the critical distractor for each list are shown. In the fourth and fifth columns, the mean
arousal rating (on a 9-point scale) of the 15 list words and the critical distractor for each list are

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

5 10 15 20

d
pr

im
e

Age

High Neg
High Pos
Low Neg
Low Pos

Fig. 1. Developmental increases in negatively-valenced false memories (high and low arousal) and positively-valenced false
memories (high and low arousal) from an experiment reported by Brainerd et al. (2010).

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 251

shown. From these tabled values, it is clear that by sampling subsets of the lists, it is possible to con-
duct studies of emotional false memory in which (a) valence varies but arousal is held constant, (b)
arousal varies but valence is held constant, or (c) arousal and valence are both varied factorially.

As yet, only one developmental study has been published with these counterbalanced materials,
which was reported by Brainerd et al. (2010). Valence and arousal effects were separated by factorially
manipulating them: Lists from each of the four Valence � Arousal cells of Table 1 were administered to
samples of 7-, 11-, and 20-year-olds, followed by recognition tests for list words, critical distractors, and
semantically unrelated distractors. Because response bias, as indexed by false alarms to unrelated dis-
tractors, usually declines with age (for a review, see Brainerd et al., 2009), the signal detection statistic d0

was used to measure false memory levels for each Valence � Arousal combination. The results are plot-
ted by age in Fig. 1. There are five key patterns. First and foremost, contrary to the commonsense idea
that children might be more susceptible to the distortive influence of emotion than adolescents or
adults, the data ran in the opposite direction. Regardless of whether arousal was higher or lower, false
memory increased with age for both types of emotional valence. Second, consistent with the hypothesis
that negative valence is a more salient gist than positive valence, negative valence produced higher lev-
els of false memory than positive valence, regardless of arousal level. Third, consistent with the hypoth-
esis that arousal interferes with verbatim retrieval’s ability to suppress false memory, the higher-
arousal lists produced more false memory than the lower-arousal lists, regardless of valence. Fourth,
the second and third patterns waxed with development—false memory did not vary as a function of
either valence or arousal in 7-year-olds. Although all of these results of are of forensic interest, the fifth
is perhaps of greatest significance for the reliability of witnesses memories: The configuration of va-
lence and arousal that produced the highest levels of false memory is the same configuration that is
present in criminal cases—namely, negative valence + high arousal. Another key result that is not appar-
ent in Fig. 1 echoes some previously mentioned studies of nonemotional false memory: Emotional false
memory increased so much with age that net accuracy was higher in 7-year-olds than in young adults.

Considering the legal significance of false memory for emotional experiences, it goes without say-
ing that there is an urgent need to accelerate developmental research on this topic. The current archive
of studies is so thin that research on this topic is only just beginning, and hence, it does not yet provide
a firm foundation for expert scientific testimony. Nevertheless, some important patterns have
emerged. So far, the data have run against the common sense idea that children’s memories are more
susceptible to the distortive influence of emotion. Whenever a study using the emotional version of
the DRM illusion included younger children, they exhibited lower levels of false memory than adults
or adolescents. Also, contrary to a leading adult theory of how emotion affects memory, the affect as
information hypothesis, the data have also run against the hypothesis that valence, especially negative
valences, causes encoding to focus on the surface features of events, thereby reducing semantic false
memory. Instead, the data are more consistent with the hypothesis that negative valence is a coherent
gist that foments false memory, with its effects being amplified by increased arousal.

It should be added that these data only apply to circumstances in which children actually experi-
ence emotional events and therefore may be assumed to store memories of such events. If the alleged
events did not happen, which is one of the two standard defense theories in criminal cases, the data
are not relevant. This is not a consideration in false memory research, of course, where we have con-
trol over events, but it is a key consideration in the law, where we do not.

Testing explanatory principles

The studies that have been reviewed up to this point establish quite clearly that developmental
reversals in false memory are robust realities. We know that they can be produced under theoreti-
cally-specified conditions by tasks that range from word lists to complex thematic events to tasks that
simulate important features of criminal cases, such as manipulative questioning of witnesses and eye-
witness identification of suspects. On the one hand, such an existence proof of developmental rever-
sals is significant when it comes to traditional expert testimony about the vulnerability of child
witnesses’ memories to falsification. In that connection, the recent tendency for some courts to rule
that such testimony is not needed because such vulnerability is common knowledge evidently needs
to be tempered. On the other hand, the courts require more than empirical demonstrations of age

252 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

trends in false memory. Because the details of legal cases and therefore the types of events that wit-
nesses attempt to remember vary from case to case, the most helpful scientific information in the
uncertain business of judging the credibility of different sources of evidence is empirically-substanti-
ated theoretical principles. Such principles are especially helpful for the simple reason that they cut
across different events and different contexts; they hold across the normal range of variability (Brain-
erd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008).

Some candidate principles, and we stress ‘‘candidate,’’ are available in the ideas that predicted
developmental reversals in the first place, which were rather simple, certainly simple enough for expert
testimony to explain to jurors: Age increases in false memory are likely to occur in circumstances in
which (a) having false memories depends on extracting the meaning content of experience, especially
connecting shared meanings across disparate events, and (b) there are obstacles to using verbatim
memories of actual events to suppress false memories of related events. What sorts of findings would
be needed to convert these two ideas to empirically-substantiated status? Generally speaking, what is
required is an archive of experimentation in which manipulations that embody the ideas are found to
have two effects. First, they should drive false memory levels in the appropriate directions. Specifically,
manipulations that make it more likely that meaning content will be processed and connected during
encoding or on memory tests ought to increase false memory, while manipulations that place obstacles
in the path of semantic processing or that make it more likely that verbatim traces will be used on
memory tests should suppress false memories. Second, such manipulations should interact with age

Level A Level BF
al

se
M

em
or

y
Le

ve
l

Manipulation

Younger
Older

(A)

Level A Level B

Fa
ls

e
M

em
or
y
Le
ve
l
Manipulation
Younger
Older

(B)

Level A Level B
Fa
ls
e
M
em
or
y
Le
ve
l
Manipulation
Younger
Older

(C)

Fig. 2. Basic types of necessity interactions in semantic take-away studies of developmental reversals. Panel A = manipulations
that shrink developmental reversals, Panel B = manipulations that eliminate developmental reversals, and Panel C = manip-
ulations that produce cross overs.

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 253

in predictable ways. Specifically, manipulations that enhance semantic processing should be less effec-
tive in increasing false memory in adults or adolescents than in children (because semantic processing
is what children lack), and manipulations that interfere with semantic processing or shift processing in
the direction of verbatim memory should be less effective in reducing false memory in children than in
adolescents or adults (because those age levels are possessed of superior semantic processing).

In the parlance of developmental research, findings of the first type are called sufficiency interac-
tions, while findings of the second type are called necessity interactions. In the remainder of this sec-
tion, we summarize some salient examples of manipulations that have produced each type of
interaction, the ultimate consequence being to directly tie developmental reversals to the principles
that originally predicted them.

Necessity interactions

The rationale underlying necessity interactions is take-away logic; that is, the aim is to take away
some process that is presumed to be crucial to age increases in false memory, and hence, the focus is
on changing older subjects (who are likely to possess that process) more than younger ones. Suppose
that the growth of some memory ability M (processing and connecting meaning in this case) is
hypothesized to cause age increases in false memory. If so, manipulations that block that activity
ought to reduce false memory more at ages levels where the development of M is reasonably far along
(and false memory rates are higher) than at younger age levels, producing what are traditionally called
convergent interactions in analysis of variance (see Fig. 2 for illustrations). Thus, if we institute manip-
ulations that block semantic processing in the connected-meaning paradigms that are known to pro-
duce developmental reversals, age increases in false memory should shrink (Fig. 2A), or perhaps
disappear (Fig. 2B), because there is more to be blocked in older than in younger subjects. The types
of manipulations that have generated such interactions are ones that transparently shift subjects away
from processing semantic content and forming meaning relations on connected-meaning tasks.

With the DRM illusion, categorized materials, and more complex tasks, there is an impressive col-
lection of semantic take-away manipulations that have produced necessity interactions by either
shrinking or eliminating the developmental reversal effect. The chief examples are: (a) list length (Car-
neiro et al., 2007; Sugrue & Hayne, 2006); (b) presenting lists pictorially (Howe, 2006, 2008); (c) pre-
senting lists with phonological rather than semantic relations between targets (Dewhurst et al., 2011;
Khanna & Cortese, 2009); (d) presenting lists with weak rather than strong semantic relations be-
tween targets (Brainerd et al., 2002); (e) measuring false memory in disabled versus nondisabled sub-
jects (Brainerd et al., 2006; Weekes et al., 2007); (f) random versus blocked presentation of meaning-
sharing events (Lampinen, Leding, Reed, & Odegard, 2006); and (g) cuing of incorrect list themes (Ode-
gard, Holliday, Brainerd, & Reyna, 2008). Such manipulations would be expected to partly or wholly
neutralize the superior semantic-processing of older subjects in one of three ways.

The first way, which is the route that has most often been taken to generate necessity interactions,
is to make the semantic relations that support false memories less salient, so that older subjects are
less likely to follow their normal tendency to process them. Presenting events in such a way that
events that share those relations do not appear together (manipulation f), presenting fewer exemplars
of such relations (manipulation a), presenting events that are poor exemplars of such relations
(manipulation d), presenting events in which such relations are absent (manipulation c), and cuing
competing semantic relations (manipulation g) are all examples of this approach. A second way to
neutralize the superior semantic-processing of older subjects is to make it easier for them to rely
on their superior verbatim abilities instead. Presenting events that lead to the formation of especially
strong verbatim traces (manipulation b) is an example of this approach. A third way to neutralize the
superior semantic processing of older subjects is simply to test subjects who are known to have
semantic processing limitations, so that the baseline superiority of older subjects is reduced. Manip-
ulation e is an example of this last approach.

Some readers will be thinking that there is a more extreme class of necessity interactions—namely,
Age � Manipulation cross-overs, in which connected-meaning paradigms produce developmental
reversals under one level of a manipulation (e.g., the standard version of the paradigm) but produce
the customary developmental decline under another level. Readers will also be thinking that the

254 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

theoretical principles that predict developmental reversals anticipate that such cross-overs can occur
when manipulations reduce the relevant form of semantic processing to a minimum and at the same
time maximize verbatim processing. Cross-overs have indeed been detected with manipulations of
that sort in experiments by Brainerd and Reyna (2007), Carneiro and Fernandez (2010), Ceci et al.
(2007), and Holliday, Brainerd, and Reyna (2011).

Brainerd and Reyna (2007) used a categorized list procedure that had been found to produce devel-
opmental reversals (Howe, 2006, 2007). They noted that in prior developmental work on false mem-
ory for categorized lists (Brainerd & Reyna, 1996; Brainerd et al., 1995), false recognition of
unpresented exemplars had decreased with age. In that work, the study lists contained single exem-
plars of categories (e.g., false memory for guitar was tested following a list on which piano appeared),
whereas in Howe’s studies, the lists contained many exemplars of categories (e.g., false memory for
guitar was tested following a list on which piano, drums, trumpet, violin, clarinet, trombone, saxophone,
and tuba all appeared). Brainerd and Reyna (2007) proposed that this produced the contrasting age
trends, in line with the hypothesis that forming meaning connections, rather than simply understand-
ing meaning, is crucial to developmental reversals. They compared false memory for the same unpre-
sented exemplars (e.g., guitar) when study lists contained 8 words versus 1 word from the target
category, finding as predicted that false recognition increased between age 8 and age 14 with the first
procedure but decreased with the second. In the Carneiro and Fernandez (2010) study, the authors
implemented a warning procedure to lower reliance on semantic processing and to increase reliance
on verbatim memory in the DRM illusion. Before presenting DRM lists, children in the 4–14 range
were warned that the experimenter was attempting to trick them by presenting several words that
were related to each other, which would cause them to think of other related words that they would
then falsely report on memory tests. The children were cautioned to be wary of this deception and to
only report words that were actually presented. False recall and false recognition both increased with
age in a standard (no warning) DRM condition, but deceased with age in this warning condition.

Turning to the cross-over interactions reported by Ceci et al. (2007) and Holliday et al. (2011), the
methodology of the former study was discussed above—where it was noted that a developmental

Level A Level B
Fa
ls
e
M
em
or
y
Le
ve
l
Manipulation
Younger
Older
(A)
Level A Level B
Fa
ls
e
M
em
or
y
Le
ve
l
Manipulation
Younger
Older
(B)

Fig. 3. Basic types of necessity interactions in semantic prosthetic studies of developmental reversals. Panel A = manipulations
that shrink developmental reversals, and Panel B = manipulations that eliminate developmental reversals.

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 255

reversal was produced for implanted false memories using picture stories containing objects for which
(based on prior rating data) older children would be more likely than younger children to process the
semantic relations that would foment false memory. However, the picture story included other objects
for which (based on the same data) older children would be less likely to process the relevant semantic
relations, eliminating their baseline superiority in semantic processing and allowing their superior
verbatim memories to take over. As expected, there was an Age � Type of Picture cross-over, with
these latter pictures producing developmental decreases in false memory. Finally, Holliday et al. gen-
erated a cross-over by comparing a standard DRM condition, in which lists are presented as whole
words, to a ‘‘shallow’’ encoding condition in which lists were presented as word fragments with a sin-
gle missing letter (e.g., tabl__, si__, leg__, sea__, and so forth for the ‘‘chair’’ list), and subjects were re-
quired to fill in the missing letter. This type of presentation focuses processing on words’ surface
forms, rather than their meaning, and shifts performance in the direction of verbatim retrieval on
memory tests (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). Consistent with that scenario, Holliday et al. found that be-
tween the ages of 7 and 11, the false alarm rate for critical distractors increased from 31% to 43% in
the standard condition, but it decreased from 26% to 14% in the shallow condition.

Sufficiency interactions

The rationale for sufficiency interactions is giving rather than taking away; that is, the aim is to
supply prosthetics for some process that is presumed to be crucial to age increases in false memory,
and hence, the focus is on changing younger subjects (who are unlikely to possess that process) more
than older ones. As before, suppose that the growth of some memory ability M, such as processing and
connecting meaning, is hypothesized to cause age increases in false memory. If so, manipulations that
encourage or provide support for that activity ought to enhance false memory more at younger ages
levels, where the development of M is less far along (and false memory rates are lower), than at older
age levels. This should again produce convergent interactions, but ones that are the opposite of neces-
sity interactions (see Fig. 3 for the two basic varieties). Thus, if manipulations are imposed that sup-
port semantic processing in connected-meaning paradigms that are known to produce developmental
reversals, age increases in false memory should shrink (Fig. 3A), or perhaps disappear (Fig. 3B), be-
cause such support aids younger children more than older than older children or adults. The types
of manipulations that have produced such interactions are ones that transparently encourage the pro-
cessing of semantic content and the formation of meaning relations. We consider the two main exam-
ples, gist cuing and story context.

Gist cuing

An obvious example of such a manipulation, which has been found to produce both the type of suf-
ficiency interaction in Fig. 3A and the type in Fig. 3B, is what Brainerd et al. (2004) called gist cuing. To
date, it has been studied in experiments reported by Brainerd et al. (2004, 2006), Brainerd, Reyna, Ceci,
and Holliday (2008), Holliday, Brainerd, and Reyna (2008), Lampinen et al. (2006), and Howe (2006).
The logic of this manipulation, which derives from prior developmental studies of memory for taxo-
nomic relations (for reviews, see Bjorklund, 1987; Bjorklund & Muir, 1988), is that younger children’s
failure to form strong meaning connections among semantically related events can be ameliorated by
simply telling them that they should do so—usually, by telling them to search for such relations as tar-
get materials are encoded. A general finding of those studies is that the effectiveness of gist cuing fol-
lows an inverted-U relation with age: It is most effective at intermediate age levels, such as later
childhood, than during very early childhood or young adulthood. The reason, of course, as Bjorklund,
Miller, Coyle, and Slawinski (1997) discussed, is that the success of gist cuing will be maximal when
children have reached the age at which basic semantic processing abilities have emerged but have not
yet reached the age at which the use of those abilities is so advanced that meaning connections are
formed automatically.

The initial studies of gist cuing in false memory only included two age levels and, hence, could not
test for inverted-U relations. Brainerd et al. (2004) found that gist cuing elevated false memory for cat-
egory exemplars more in 7-year-olds than in 14-year-olds, and Brainerd et al. (2006) found that gist

256 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

cuing elevated false memory for DRM critical distractors more in 6-year-olds than in 14-year-olds.
When gist cuing was compared to no-cuing conditions, both experiments produced an Age � Cuing
interaction of the sort depicted in Fig. 3A. In a later study, Odegard et al., 2008 studied gist cuing at
2 age levels, 11-year-olds and young adults. When a condition in which subjects were cued with
the themes of DRM lists was compared to a standard presentation condition, an interaction like that
in Fig. 3B was obtained.

In another DRM study, Lampinen et al. (2006) were the first to test for inverted-U relations, by
comparing a gist cuing condition to a standard no-curing condition in 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and
young adults. Their data (false alarm rates for critical distractors) are plotted in Fig. 4, and comparing
performance in the cuing versus no cuing conditions, two patterns emerge. First, gist cuing increased
false memory more in 8-year-olds than in 6-year-olds or young adults, and, second, there was an
Age � Cuing interaction of the sort depicted in Fig. 3A between age 8 and young adulthood. Holliday
et al. (2008) studied the effects of gist cuing on DRM false recall at five age levels: age 7, 9, 11, 13, and
15. Like Lampinen et al., they found that cuing’s tendency to increase false memory was greater at one
of the intermediate age levels (13) than at earlier or later age levels.

Story context

Another, especially powerful, semantic prosthetic has been investigated in DRM studies by Dew-
hurst, Pursglove, and Lewis (2007) and Howe and Wilkinson (2011). In this procedure, false memory
in a standard presentation condition is compared to false memory in a condition in which the words
on individual lists are presented in sentences that form a story that revolves around the theme of the
list. To illustrate, the words for which doctor is the critical distractor are presented in a story about a
girl named Sally who was ill, who not take her medicine, and had to go to a clinic for treatment. The
salient feature of this manipulation, of course, is that children do not have to spontaneously connect
the gist among the list words because the story does it for them. When Dewhurst et al. introduced this
procedure, they compared the DRM false recognition of 5-, 8-, and 11-year-olds in a story context ver-
sus a control condition. Their results are plotted in Fig. 5A. In the control condition, as usual, false rec-
ognition increased with age. In the story context condition, as predicted, presenting DRM lists in
stories increased false recognition far more in the youngest children than at the two older age levels.
However, as can be seen in Fig. 5A, there was an unanticipated pattern: Story context caused false
memory to decline between age 5 and the two older age levels. There is no obvious explanation for this
pattern, but readers may remember that the memory development literature contains occasional
studies in which strategy manipulations that help younger children’s memories impair older chil-
dren’s by interfering with the normal way that older children use well-learned strategies (see Schnei-
der & Bjorklund, 1998; Schneider & Pressley, 1997).

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

5 10 15 20
Fa
ls

e
R

ec
og

ni
tio

n
Age

Control
Gist Cuing

Fig. 4. Effects of gist cuing versus standard presentation on DRM false memory at three age levels. The plotted data are from
Lampinen et al. (2006).

0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9

1

5 8 11

Fa
ls
e
R
ec
og
ni
tio
n
Age

Control
Story Context

(A)
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1

7 11

Fa
ls
e
R
ec
og
ni
tio
n
Age
Control
Story Context
(B)

Fig. 5. Effects of story context presentation versus standard presentation on DRM false memory at different age levels. The data
in Panel A are from Dewhurst et al. (2007). The data in Panel B are from Howe and Wilkinson (2011).

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 257

However, based on a later experiment by Howe and Wilkinson (2011), the odd developmental
trend in Dewhurst et al. (2007) may be a statistical aberration that does not require explanation. Howe
and Wilkinson compared the DRM false recognition of 7- and 11-year-olds in a story context versus a
control condition, and their results for critical distractors are plotted in Fig. 5B. There, it can be seen
that (a) story context greatly elevated false recognition in 7-year-olds, and (b) it also elevated false
recognition in 11-year-olds, though by only a small amount. Consequently, there was an Age � Pre-
sentation interaction of the Fig. 3A variety inasmuch as developmental reversals in false memory were
more marked with standard presentation than with story contexts.

Summary and interpretive comments

In the first section of this paper, we discussed some theoretical ideas that provide a mechanism for
predicting that semantic false memory can sometimes increase between early childhood and young
adulthood, especially when (a) it depends on forming meaning connections among disparate events
and (b) it is difficult to use verbatim traces of those events to suppress false memories. In the second
section, we exhibited many examples of studies in which this counterintuitive prediction has been
confirmed and listed them in Table 1. In the present section, we took up the more fundamental ques-
tion, for the law as well as for the science of memory development, of whether there is independent
empirical support for the parent theoretical ideas. We have seen that there is, in the form of necessity
interactions and sufficiency interactions that have been detected in several DRM studies, plus a smat-
tering of studies with categorized materials and other paradigms.

Necessity interactions evaluate the hypothesis that if improved semantic processing, particularly
improved meaning connection, is a cornerstone of age increases in semantic false memory, then it will

258 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

be possible to shrink or erase those increases by placing obstacles in the path of semantic processing.
We saw that there is a group of manipulations that interfere with semantic processing in various ways
(e.g., by presenting fewer exemplars of a meaning or by presenting less salient meanings) that have
the expected effects. Some especially powerful manipulations are able to flip–flop the relation be-
tween age and level of false memory. Sufficiency interactions evaluate the contrasting hypothesis that
if improved semantic processing is a cornerstone of age increases in semantic false memory, it will
also be possible to shrink or erase those increases by supplying aids to such processing. We saw that
two manipulations of that sort have been investigated, gist cuing and story context, and that both have
reduced age increases in false memory by increasing false memory more in younger subjects.

In short, the accumulated evidence on necessity and sufficiency interactions provides independent
support for the theoretical principles that first predicted developmental reversals in false memory. It
should be stressed that this does address the question of whether there are other mechanisms that
also contribute to developmental reversals, and indeed, other mechanisms have been proposed
(e.g., Howe, 2006; Metzger et al., 2008). Many such possibilities remain to be explored, and some will
eventually be added to the list of empirically-verified processes. Here, it must be remembered that
what is important for the law is cumulative rather than complete knowledge. That is, what is essential
is that we possess scientific understanding of some of the major factors that cause developmental
reversals, not that we understand all of them. An incomplete list of validated causes can be of great
assistance to triers of fact in weighing the credibility of different sources of evidence and is preferable
by far to sheer ignorance.

Concluding comments

The law has a long-standing view of the reliability of child witnesses’ memories that comes down
to us from the days of statutory exclusion and is grounded in much experimentation that was pub-
lished in the 1980s and 1990s. According to that view, the baseline situation, which jurors must weigh
in formulating verdicts, is that children’s memories are less reliable than those of adolescents and
adults, owing to the fact that false memory levels are higher and true memory levels are lower. That
view is so ingrained that some courts have ruled that it is common knowledge on which jurors need
not be educated by scientific witnesses. The core implication for testimony is that other things being
equal, when children’s evidence conflicts with that of older witnesses’, as it often does, children’s
recountings are more likely to be the erroneous ones. It is on this specific point that the expanding
literature on developmental reversals in false memory has made its historic contribution by giving
new clarity to ‘‘other things being equal.’’

Theoretical considerations predict and data confirm that there are classes of events—specifically,
ones that are connected by salient semantic relations—for which other things are not equal because
older subjects are more likely process and store the information that generates false memories than
children are. Research with various paradigms in which false memories are rooted in meaning connec-
tions have revealed the predicted age increases in errors, and in paradigms that produce especially
large increases, net accuracy has declined with age. With those same tasks, the memory processes that
were used to predict these patterns in the first place have been found to be both necessary and suf-
ficient to produce them. A point about these results that is of overriding legal significance is that, con-
trary to the traditional view of how witness reliability varies with age, they provide grounds for
supposing that age increases in false memory for real-world events may be quite wide spread. That
is because connected-meaning paradigms tap one of most enduring features of real-world experi-
ence—namely, that distinct events share meaning. As readers are well aware, our everyday lives con-
sist in large measure of well-defined, tableau-like situations, each of which exposes us to multiple
events that share the salient meanings of the index situation (arising and getting for the day, preparing
and eating breakfast, driving to work or school, attending class, eating lunch with friends, shopping at
a mall or grocery story, attending a movie or concert, and so on and on). Thus, our daily experience is
dominated by real-world events that exhibit the very properties that theory says (and data confirm)
foment age increases in false memory and produce net reductions in accuracy.

Another point of overriding legal significance is that developmental increases and decreases in false
memory are both lawful patterns. Some might be tempted to think that because opposite age trends

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 259

have been identified, developmental findings on false memory are just a welter of inconsistency; that
nothing can be concluded that is substantial enough to meet a Frye or Daubert test in the courtroom.
Such thinking would be a capital mistake because we saw at the outset that (a) opposite developmen-
tal trends were predicted on theoretical grounds before they were detected, and (b) the same theoret-
ical ideas that predicted opposite trends specified the exact conditions under which each will be
observed. Thus, the actual conclusion for the law is that developmental findings on false memory pro-
vide firm empirical support for theoretical principles that can form the basis of expert testimony.

To conclude this article, we stress that although accumulated research on developmental reversals
has historic implications for the law’s view of the reliability of child witnesses, it should be seen as an
edifice whose construction is just beginning. Far more remains to be done than what has already been
accomplished. As things stand, extant research has put two forensic cornerstones in place: The notion
that children’s evidence is necessarily more infected with false memories than adolescents’ or adults’ is
mistaken, and there are domains of everyday experience in which age increases in false memory are
likely to occur and may even be the rule. However, a good deal of theoretical analysis and focused exper-
imentation are needed to deepen the forensic connections of such research; to identify forensic situa-
tions and forensically-relevant variables that are reliable sources of developmental reversals. We
close with a prominent example of one such situation, memory suggestion, and one such variable, emo-
tional memory. We also note that developmental reversal data are thin for the full span of adolescence.

Memory suggestion

Concerning suggestion, from the first developmental research on the reliability of witnesses’ evi-
dence has been dominated by studies of child suggestibility, using the Loftus misinformation paradigm
(Bruck & Ceci, 1999; Ceci & Bruck, 1993). That is because in legal cases, perhaps the most prominent
way in which children’s memories are contaminated is via suggestive questioning by investigators, par-
ents, teachers, therapists, friends, and so on (Ceci & Bruck, 1995). As mentioned earlier, the resulting
literature now contains dozens of studies in which false memory for suggested events has been found
to decline between early childhood and young adulthood, so that reviewers of that literature have nat-
urally concluded and expert witnesses have naturally testified that childhood is an especially sugges-
tion-prone time of life (Bruck & Ceci, 1999). Against this backdrop, there are newer studies in which the
misinformation paradigm has been modified to implement theoretical principles that predict develop-
mental reversals. Consistent with those principles, suggestion-induced errors have increased rather
than decreased with age. However, that group consists of only five studies (Ceci et al., 2007; Connolly
& Price, 2006; Fazio & Marsh, 2008; Principe et al., 2008; Ross et al., 2006). There are also two earlier
ones by Pezdek and Roe (1995, 1997) that produced age increases in susceptibility to memory sugges-
tions in simulated forensic situations, but that brings the total to just seven. It is true that the non-acci-
dental nature of the five recent studies—that they produced age increases under theoretically-specified
conditions—counts heavily in their favor. However, seven studies seems a paltry sum in comparison to
the dozens that have produced age declines, in many countries and multiple languages.

Consequently, it is natural for the law to take a wait-and-see approach—adopting the working
hypothesis, until the data become overwhelming, that the few misinformation studies that have pro-
duced developmental reversals could be statistical aberrations. That, in turn, means continuing to rely
on the age decrease pattern in assessing the reliability of children’s evidence. In fact, there are signs of
such attitudes in recent discussions of child witnesses in the psycho-legal literature (e.g., Bull, 2010;
Neoh & Mellor, 2009), discussions that reaffirm the age decrease pattern and make no mention of
studies that generated the opposite pattern. The message could not be clearer, we think: To ensure
that developmental reversals in susceptibility to suggestion penetrate the forensic literature and ex-
pert testimony, more experimentation that demonstrates the reality of those reversals and establishes
the conditions that produce them is an urgent priority.

Emotional false memory

Turning to emotional false memory, a central feature of crimes is that the events are emotional—
specifically, they are negatively valenced and arousing—so that recounting those events means

260 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

(a) retrieving memories that were formed in an atmosphere of emotional arousal (e.g., fear of being
harmed) and (b) retrieving memories of things that were emotionally arousing in themselves (e.g.,
remembering a weapon or a threatening remark). A question that the scientific study of the reliability
of testimony must squarely confront, then, is whether emotional content is distortive or protective
when it comes to the accuracy of witnesses’ recountings and whether such effects vary with age.
Although the mainstream memory literature contains several studies of how emotional content affects
memory for actual events (for a review, see Kensinger, 2004), studies of how it influences false mem-
ory are few in number and more recent (e.g., Budson et al., 2006). Some theorists (e.g., Rivers et al.,
2008) predict that the types of emotions that are associated with crimes—that is, negative and arous-
ing ones—will increase false memory because negative content is a strong gist and because arousal
interferes with verbatim memory, and that prediction has been confirmed in experiments that focused
on false memory for events that were emotional in themselves (Brainerd et al., 2010). Those same
considerations predict that developmental increases in false memory will be more marked for
negative arousing experiences than for positive or neutral ones.

We saw that methodological tools are available to evaluate such predictions, in the form of emo-
tion-induction tasks (e.g., Storbeck & Clore, 2005) and emotional connected-meaning tasks (e.g., Bud-
son et al., 2006). Those tools allow the impact of emotional content on age variability in false memory
to be rigorously investigated using mild levels of emotional arousal that do not raise ethical concerns
(Brainerd et al., 2010). Considering the simplicity of these methods, not to mention the high relevance
of emotion to the law, it is remarkable that so few developmental studies implementing them have
been published. We failed to locate a single published developmental study of false memory that
adopted the first procedure and only a few that adopted the second. Except for a study of facial expres-
sions of emotion (Fernandez-Dols et al., 2008), all of the latter relied on some variant of Budson et al.’s
emotional DRM task, wherein false memory for negative-arousing critical distractors is compared to
false memory for neutral-nonarousing ones. Although those studies are few in number, they have gen-
erated data of potential significance for the law. Together, the studies by Howe and associates (Howe,
2007; Howe et al., 2010) and by Goodman and associates (Goodman et al., 2011) revealed substantial
levels of false memory for negative-arousing critical distractors, found that false memory can be more
pronounced for such critical distractors than for neutral ones under some conditions, found that false
memory for negative-arousing critical distractors also exhibits developmental reversals, and found
that developmental reversals can be more pronounced for negative-arousing critical distractors than
for neutral ones under some conditions. Very recently, Otgaar, Peters, and Howe (in press) also re-
ported high levels of false memory and developmental reversals for negative-arousing critical distrac-
tors, under both full and divided attention conditions. Because the valence and arousal components of
emotion were confounded in all of these studies, it is not clear which component was responsible for
the effects that were just mentioned. That matter can be clarified by manipulating the two compo-
nents factorially with the new materials in Table 2, and the limited data that have been gathered sug-
gest that valence and arousal both contribute to such effects but that valence makes larger
contributions. Because delays are endemic in legal cases, other results of interest are Howe et al.’s
findings that false memory for negative-arousing critical distractors increases as time passes, that
the increase is greater than for neutral-nonarousing critical distractors, and that the developmental
reversal effect for negative-arousing critical distractors increases as time passes.

A data archive on the development of emotional false memory is thus beginning to accumulate, but
the operative word is ‘‘beginning.’’ As is so often true in the early phases of research, the extant liter-
ature is replete with empirical inconsistencies that will need to be sorted out and with empirical gaps
that need to be filled in. With respect to inconsistencies, perhaps the most obvious one revolves
around the two core methods of testing episodic memory, recognition and recall. The question of
whether recall or recognition is more apt to stimulate false memories during criminal investigation
has long figured prominently in research, especially in research on best-practice protocols for inves-
tigative interviewing of children (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Poole & Lamb, 1998). Considering the centrality
of emotion in criminal investigation, it is particularly important to answer this question for emotional
false memory. So far, every possible configuration of results has been reported. Howe and associates
(2007) and Howe et al. (2010) initially found that levels of emotional false memory were higher for
recognition than for recall, with emotional false memory being higher than neutral false memory with

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 261

recognition but the reverse being true for recall. Goodman et al. (2011) then found that emotional false
memory was higher than neutral false memory with recall, but the reverse was true for recognition.
Very recently, Otgaar, Verschuere, Meijer, and van Oorsouw (2012) found that recall tests produced
equivalent levels of emotional and neutral false memory. To say the least, inconsistent findings as
to whether recognition or recall is more likely to stimulate emotional false memories do not provide
a firm basis for making best-practice recommendations about forensic interviewing.

With respect to gaps in developmental research on emotional false memory, there is a yawning
chasm when it comes to methodological breadth. In the studies that we reviewed, all relied on proce-
dures in which emotional content was embedded in the to-be-remembered events, and all but one
(Fernandez-Dols et al., 2008) relied on some version of the emotional DRM task. This is not a very
broad basis for forensic practice or expert testimony, even if the research had not produced major
empirical inconsistencies. A telling illustration of methodological narrowness is the aforementioned
fact that one of the two core approaches to studying emotional false memory, mood induction, does
not seem to have been used in any published developmental research. In this approach, it will be re-
called, subjects are first placed in negative, positive, or neutral moods—by listening to several minutes
of emotionally arousing music or by viewing a number of emotionally arousing pictures (e.g., Storbeck
& Clore, 2005; Corson & Verrier, 2007). Once the appropriate emotional state has been created, sub-
jects proceed to the memory part of the experiment and are exposed to the to-be-remembered events
(e.g., characters, actions, and objects in a narrative or a video), which may consist of both neutral and
emotional events. That is followed at some later point by memory tests.

The key forensic consideration is that there are no guarantees that the findings that we reviewed
for the first approach to emotional false memory will hold for the second. On the contrary, the second
approach has been implemented in recent studies of emotional false memory in adults to test predic-
tions that are the opposite of some of those findings. For instance, Storbeck and Clore (2005) proposed
that if negative moods are induced in subjects before they encode to-be-remembered information,
their processing of that information will be shifted toward surface details and away from semantic
content, relative to neutral or positive moods. In short, induction of negative moods simultaneously
strengthens the verbatim traces that suppress false memories and weakens the gist traces that foment
false memories. In their research, Storbeck and Clore administered DRM lists followed by recall tests to
subjects after inducing negative, positive, or neutral moods. They found, as predicted, that false recall
was lowest in subjects who had been placed in negative moods. Later, Corson and Verrier (2007) rep-
licated this pattern and showed that it was chiefly due to the arousal rather than the valence compo-
nent of negative moods. If being placed in negative moods lowers false memory in adults, age
increases in false memory will presumably be smaller for subjects who were in negative moods than
for subjects who were in neutral or positive ones.

Summing up, developmental research on emotional false memory has produced some tantalizing
results. However, such research is far away from achieving the levels of empirical agreement and meth-
odological breadth that are commensurate with the importance of emotional memory in legal cases.

Adolescence

Another important lacuna in the data base is the general absence of findings on adolescence, par-
ticularly middle-to-late adolescence. In Table 1, it can be seen that in 23 articles, the age spread of the
subject samples ranges from childhood to adulthood. However, subjects from the adolescent years
were included in very few of those studies. In the typical study (e.g., Howe, 2005; Lampinen et al.,
2006), the comparison was simply been between children and young adults, with adolescents not
being tested. In the few studies in which adolescents were included (e.g., Brainerd et al., 2002), only
younger adolescents who were tested. Thus, findings on variables that contribute to age increases in
false memory throughout the adolescent years are extremely scarce.

Epilogue

Developmental research on false memory has provided what, when the history of this era is writ-
ten, will surely be seen as a singularly productive collaboration between the law and psychological

262 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

science inasmuch as such research has truly changed how cases are investigated and tried. It has also
altered the content of expert scientific testimony and what the courts view as acceptable scientific tes-
timony. More changes, it would seem, are in the offing that reflect a new generation of findings about
developmental reversals in false memory, findings that challenge accepted wisdom about the reliabil-
ity of children’s memories.

Acknowledgment

Portions of the research were supported by National Institutes of Health Grant 1RC1AG036915-01.

References

Ackerman, B. P. (1992). The sources of children’s source errors in judging causal inferences. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 54, 90–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(92)90019-3.

Ackerman, B. P. (1994). Children’s source errors in referential communication. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 58,
432–464. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1994.1044.

Ackil, J. K., & Zaragoza, M. S. (1995). Developmental differences in eyewitness suggestibility and memory for source. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 57–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1031.

Ackil, J. K., & Zaragoza, M. S. (1998). Memorial consequences of forced confabulation: Age differences in susceptibility to false
memories. Developmental Psychology, 34, 1358–1372. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.34.6.1358.

Anastasi, J. S., Lewis, S., & Quinlan, F. (2008). Examining differences in the levels of false memories in children and adults using
child-normed lists. Developmental Psychology, 44, 889–894. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.889.

Arndt, J., & Reder, L. M. (2003). The effect of distinctive visual information on false recognition. Journal of Memory & Language, 48,
1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00518-1.

Banaji, M. R., & Crowder, R. G. (1989). The bankruptcy of everyday memory. American Psychologist, 44, 1185–1193. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.9.1185.

Binet, A. (1900). La suggestibilite. Paris: Schleicher Feres.
Bjorklund, D. F. (1987). How changes in knowledge base contribute to the development of children’s memory. Developmental

Review, 7, 93–130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0273-2297(87)90007-4.
Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). Children’s thinking: Cognitive development and individual differences. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Bjorklund, D. F., Bjorklund, B. R., & Brown, R. D. (1998). Children’s susceptibility to repeated questions: How misinformation

changes children’s answers and their minds. Applied Developmental Science, 2, 99–111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/
s1532480xads0202_4.

Bjorklund, D. F., Cassel, W. S., Bjorklund, B. R., Brown, R. D., Park, C. L., Ernst, K., et al (2000). Social demand characteristics in
children’s and adults’ eyewitness memory and suggestibility: The effect of different interviewers on free recall and
recognition. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 421–433. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1099-0720(200009)14:5<421::AID- ACP659>3.0.CO;2-4.

Bjorklund, D. F., & Hock, H. H. (1982). Age differences in the temporal locus of memory organization in children’s recall. Journal
of Experimental Child Psychology, 33, 347–362. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(82)90025-X.

Bjorklund, D. F., & Jacobs, J. W. (1985). Associative and categorical processes in children’s memory: The role of automaticity in
the development of free recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 599–617. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-
0965(85)90059-1.

Bjorklund, D. F., Miller, P. H., Coyle, T. R., & Slawinski, J. L. (1997). Instructing children to use memory strategies: Evidence of
utilization deficiencies in memory training studies. Developmental Review, 17, 411–441. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/
drev.1997.0440.

Bjorklund, D. F., & Muir, J. E. (1988). Children’s development of free recall memory: Remembering on their own. Annals of Child
Development, 5, 79–123.

Bouwmeester, S., & Verkoeijen, P. P. J. L. (2010). Latent variable modeling of cognitive processes in true and false. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 365–381. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0019301.

Bouwmeester, S., Vermunt, J. K., & Sijtsma, K. (2007). Development and individual differences in transitive reasoning: A fuzzy
trace theory approach. Developmental Review, 27, 41–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2006.08.001.

Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective norms for English words (ANEW): Instruction manual and affective ratings. Technical
Report C-1, Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida.

Brainerd, C. J., Forrest, T. J., Karibian, D., & Reyna, V. F. (2006). Development of the false-memory illusion. Developmental
Psychology, 42, 662–679. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600648449.

Brainerd, C. J., & Gordon, L. L. (1994). Development of verbatim and gist memory for numbers. Developmental Psychology, 30,
163–177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.30.2.163.

Brainerd, C. J., Holliday, R. E., & Reyna, V. F. (2004). Behavioral measurement of remembering phenomenologies: So simple a
child can do it. Child Development, 75, 505–522. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00689.x.

Brainerd, C. J., Holliday, R. E., Reyna, V. F., Yang, Y., & Toglia, M. P. (2010). Developmental reversals in false memory: Effects of
emotional valence and arousal. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107, 137–154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.
2010.04.013.

Brainerd, C. J., & Mojardin, A. H. (1998). Children’s spontaneous false memories for narrative statements: Long-term persistence
and mere testing effects. Child Development, 69, 1361–1377. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1132271.

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (1995). Autosuggestibility in memory development. Cognitive Psychology, 28, 65–101. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1995.1003.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(92)90019-3

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1994.1044

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1031

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.34.6.1358

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.889

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00518-1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.9.1185

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0273-2297(87)90007-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s1532480xads0202_4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s1532480xads0202_4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1099-0720(200009)14:5<421::AID-ACP659>3.0.CO;2-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1099-0720(200009)14:5<421::AID-ACP659>3.0.CO;2-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(82)90025-X

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(85)90059-1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(85)90059-1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/drev.1997.0440

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/drev.1997.0440

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0019301

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2006.08.001

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600648449

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.30.2.163

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00689.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.04.013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.04.013

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1132271

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1995.1003

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 263

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (1996). Mere memory testing creates false memories in children. Developmental Psychology, 32,
467–476. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.32.3.467.

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (1998). Fuzzy-trace theory and children’s false memories. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
71, 81–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1998.2464.

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2002). Fuzzy-trace theory and false memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11,
164–169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00192.

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2004). Fuzzy-trace theory and memory development. Developmental Review, 24, 396–439. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2004.08.005.

Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2005). The science of false memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2007). Explaining developmental reversals in false memory. Psychological Science, 18, 442–448.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01919.x.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Brandse, E. (1995). Are children’s false memories more persistent than their true memories?

Psychological Science, 6, 359–364. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00526.x.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Ceci, S. J. (2008). Developmental reversals in false memory: A review of data and theory.

Psychological Bulletin, 134, 343–382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.343.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., Ceci, S. J., & Holliday, R. E. (2008). Understanding developmental reversals in false memory.

Psychological Bulletin, 134, 773–777. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.343.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Estrada, S. (2006). Recollection rejection of false narrative statements. Memory, 14, 672–691. http://

dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600648449.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Forrest, T. J. (2002). Are young children susceptible to the false-memory illusion? Child

Development, 73, 1363–1377. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00477.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Howe, M. L. (2009). Trichotomous processes in early memory development, aging, and

neurocognitive impairment: A unified theory. Psychological Review, 116, 732–783. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0016963.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Kneer, R. (1995). False-recognition reversal: When similarity is distinctive. Journal of Memory and

Language, 34, 157–185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1995.1008.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., Wright, R., & Mojardin, A. H. (2003). Recollection rejection: False-memory editing in children and

adults. Psychological Review, 110, 762–784. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.4.762.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Zember, E. (2011). Theoretical and forensic implications of developmental studies of the DRM

illusion. Memory & Cognition, 39, 365–380.
Brainerd, C. J., Stein, L. M., Silveira, R. A., Rohenkohl, G., & Reyna, V. F. (2008). How does negative emotion cause false memories?

Psychological Science, 19, 919–925. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02177.x.
Brainerd, C. J., Wright, R., Reyna, V. F., & Payne, D. G. (2002). Dual-retrieval processes in recall. Journal of Memory and Language,

46, 120–152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2001.2796.
Brainerd, C. J., Yang, Y., Howe, M. L., Reyna, V. F., & Mills, B. A. (2008). Semantic processing in ‘‘associative’’ false memory.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 1035–1053. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1035.
Brown, S. C., Flores, L. M., Goodman, K. M., & Conover, J. N. (1991). Clustering and recall: Do high clusterers recall more than low

clusterers because of clustering? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 710–721. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.17.4.710.

Bruck, M., & Ceci, S. J. (1999). The suggestibility of children’s memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 419–439. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.419.

Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., Francoeur, E., & Barr, R. (1995). I hardly cried when I got my shot: Influencing children’s reports about a visit
to their pediatrician. Child Development, 66, 193–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00865.x.

Budson, A. E., Todman, R. W., Chong, H., Adams, E. H., Kensinger, E. A., & Krangel, T. S. (2006). False recognition of emotional
word lists in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 19, 71–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/
01.wnn.0000213905.49525.d0.

Bull, R. (2010). The investigative interviewing of children and other vulnerable witnesses: Psychological research and working/
professional practice. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 15, 5–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/014466509X440160.

Carneiro, P., Albuquerque, P., & Fernandez, A. (2009). Opposite developmental trends for false recognition of basic and
superordinate names. Memory, 17, 411–427. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210902758847.

Carneiro, P., Albuquerque, P., Fernandez, A., & Esteves, F. (2007). Analyzing false memories in children with associative lists
specific for their age. Child Development, 78, 1171–1185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01059.x.

Carneiro, P., & Fernandez, A. (2010). Age differences in the rejection of false memories: The effects of giving warning instructions
and slowing the presentation rate. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105, 81–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.
2009.09.004.

Carneiro, P., Fernandez, A., & Dias, A. R. (2009). The influence of theme identifiability on false memories: Evidence for age-
dependent opposite effects. Memory & Cognition, 37, 115–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/MC.37.2.115.

Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 117–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00348.x.

Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). The suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin,
113, 403–439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.113.3.403.

Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the courtroom. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1998). The ontogeny and durability of true and false memories: A dual trace account. Journal of

Experimental Child Psychology, 71, 165–169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1998.2468.
Ceci, S. J., & Friedman, R. D. (2000). The suggestibility of children: Scientific research and legal implications. Cornell Law Review,

86, 34–108.
Ceci, S. J., Papierno, P. D., & Kulkofksy, S. (2007). Representational constraints on children’s suggestibility. Psychological Science,

18, 503–509. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01930.x.
Ceci, S. J., Ross, D. F., & Toglia, M. P. (1987). Suggestibility in children’s memory: Psycholegal implications. Journal of Experimental

Psychology: General, 116, 38–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.116.1.38.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.32.3.467

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1998.2464

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00192

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2004.08.005

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01919.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00526.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.343

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.343

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600648449

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00477

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0016963

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1995.1008

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.4.762

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02177.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2001.2796

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1035

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.17.4.710

http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.419

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00865.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.wnn.0000213905.49525.d0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.wnn.0000213905.49525.d0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/014466509X440160

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210902758847

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01059.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.09.004

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.09.004

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/MC.37.2.115

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00348.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.113.3.403

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1998.2468

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01930.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.116.1.38

264 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Chi, M. T. H., & Ceci, S. J. (1987). Content knowledge: Its representation and restructuring in memory developmentH. W. Reese &
L. Lipsett (Eds.). Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 20, 91–146.

Connolly, D. A., & Price, H. L. (2006). Children’s suggestibility for an instance of a repeated event versus a unique event: The
effect of degree of association between variable details. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 93, 207–223. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp. 2005.06.004.

Corson, Y., & Verrier, N. (2007). Emotions and false memories: Valence or arousal? Psychological Science, 18, 208–211. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01874.x.

Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of certain verbal intrusions in free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58,
17–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0046671.

Dewhurst, S. A., Howe, M. L., Berry, D. M., & Knott, L. M. (2011). Test-induced priming increases false recognition in older but not
younger children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 111, 101–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp. 2011.08.006.

Dewhurst, S. A., Pursglove, R. C., & Lewis, C. (2007). Story contexts increase susceptibility to the DRM illusion in 5-year-olds.
Developmental Science, 10, 374–378. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00592.x.

Dewhurst, S. A., & Robinson, C. A. (2004). False memories in children: Evidence for a shift from phonological to semantic
associations. Psychological Science, 15, 782–786. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00756.x.

Doris, J. (Ed.), (1991). The suggestibility of children’s recollections. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Fazio, L. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2008). Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories. Cognition, 106, 1081–1089.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.012.
Fernandez-Dols, J. M., Carrera, P., Barchard, K. A., & Gacitua, M. (2008). False recognition of facial expressions of emotion: Causes

and implications. Emotion, 8, 530–539. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0012724.
Fisher, A. V., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2005). When induction meets memory: Evidence for a gradual transition from similarity-based to

category-based induction. Child Development, 76, 583–597. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00865.x.
Gallo, D. A. (2006). Associative illusions of memory: False memory research in DRM and related tasks. New York: Psychology Press.
Gallo, D. (2010). False memories and fantastic beliefs: 15 years of the DRM illusion. Memory & Cognition, 7, 833–848. http://

dx.doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.7.833.
Garcia-Marques, L., Ferreira, M., Nunes, L., Garrido, M. V., & Garcia-Marques, T. (2010). False memories and impressions of

personality. Social Cognition, 28, 556–568. http://dx.doi.org/10.1521/soco.2010.28.4.556.
Gernsbacher, M. A. (1985). Surface information loss in comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 324–363. http://dx.doi.org/

10.1016/0010-0285(85)90012-X.
Ghetti, S., Qin, J., & Goodman, G. S. (2002). False memories in children and adults: Age, distinctiveness, and subjective

experience. Developmental Psychology, 38, 705–718.
Goodman, G. S. (2006). Children’s eyewitness memory: A modern history and contemporary commentary. Journal of Social

Issues, 62(4), 811–832. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00488.x.
Goodman, G. S., Ogle, C. M., Block, S. D., Harris, L. S., Larson, R. P., Augusti, E. M., et al (2011). False memory for trauma-related

Deese–Roediger–McDermott lists in adolescents and adults with histories of child sexual abuse. Development and
Psychopathology, 23, 71–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954579411000150.

Goodman, G. S., Quas, J. A., Batterman-Faunce, J. M., Riddlesberger, M. M., & Kuhn, J. (1994). Predictors of accurate and
inaccurate memories of traumatic events experienced in childhood. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 269–294. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1994.1016.

Goodman, G. S., & Schaaf, J. M. (1997). Over a decade of research on children’s eyewitness testimony: What have we learned?
Where do we go from here? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11, S5–S20.

Holliday, R. E., Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2008). Recall of details never experienced: Effects of age, repetition, and semantic
cues. Cognitive Development, 23, 67–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.05.002.

Holliday, R. E., Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2011). Developmental reversals in false memory: Now you see them, now you don’t.
Developmental Psychology, 47, 442–449. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021058.

Holliday, R. E., Reyna, V. F., & Hayes, B. K. (2002). Memory processes underlying misinformation effects in child witnesses.
Developmental Review, 22, 37–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/drev.2001.0534.

Holliday, R. E., & Weekes, B. S. (2006). Dissociated developmental trajectories for semantic and phonological false memories.
Memory, 14, 264–636. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600736525.

Howe, M. L. (1991). Misleading children’s story recall: Forgetting and reminiscence of the facts. Developmental Psychology, 27,
746–762.

Howe, M. L. (2005). Children (but not adults) can inhibit false memories. Psychological Science, 16, 927–931. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01638.x.

Howe, M. L. (2006). Developmentally invariant dissociations in children’s true and false memories: Not all relatedness is created
equal. Child Development, 77, 1112–1123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00922.x.

Howe, M. L. (2007). Children’s emotional false memories. Psychological Science, 18, 856–860. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
9280.2007.01991.x.

Howe, M. L. (2008). Visual distinctiveness and the development of children’s false memories. Child Development, 79, 65–79.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01111.x.

Howe, M. L., Candel, I., Otgaar, H., Malone, C., & Wimmer, M. C. (2010). Valence and the development of immediate and long-
term false memory illusions. Memory, 18, 58–75.

Howe, M. L., Cicchetti, D., Toth, S. L., & Cerrito, B. M. (2004). True and false memories in maltreated children. Child Development,
75, 1402–1417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00748.x.

Howe, M. L., Gagnon, N., & Thouas, L. (2007). Development of false memories in bilingual children and adults. Journal of Memory
and Language, 58, 669–681. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.09.001.

Howe, M. L., & Wilkinson, S. (2011). Using story contexts to bias children’s true and false memories. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 108, 75–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp. 2010.06.009.

Howe, M. L., Wimmer, M. C., Gagnon, N., & Plumpton, S. (2009). An associative-activation theory of children’s and adults’
memory illusions. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 229–251. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2008.10.002.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2005.06.004

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01874.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0046671

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2011.08.006

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00592.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00756.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.012

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0012724

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00865.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.7.833

http://dx.doi.org/10.1521/soco.2010.28.4.556

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(85)90012-X

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00488.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954579411000150

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1994.1016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.05.002

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021058

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/drev.2001.0534

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210600736525

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01638.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00922.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01991.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01991.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01111.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00748.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.09.001

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.06.009

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2008.10.002

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 265

Isen, A. (1987). Positive affect, cognitive processes, and social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.). Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 203–253). San Diego: Academic Press.

Israel, L., & Schacter, D. L. (1997). Pictorial encoding reduces false recognition of semantic associates. Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, 4, 577–581. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03214352.

Kassin, S. M., & Kiechel, K. L. (1996). The social psychology of false confessions: Compliance, internalization, and confabulation.
Psychological Science, 7, 125–128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00344.x.

Kensinger, E. A. (2004). Remembering and emotional experiences: The contribution of valence and arousal. Reviews in the
Neurosciences, 15, 241–251.

Khanna, M. M., & Cortese, M. J. (2009). Children and adults are differentially affected by presentation modality in the DRM
paradigm. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 859–877. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp. 1519.

Kintsch, W., Welsch, D., Schmalhofer, F., & Zimny, S. (1990). Sentence memory: A theoretical analysis. Journal of Memory &
Language, 29, 133–159. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(90)90069-C.

Knott, L. M., Howe, M. L., Wimmer, M. C., & Dewhurst, S. A. (2011). The development of automatic and controlled inhibitory
retrieval processes in true and false recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 109, 91–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.jecp. 2011.01.001.

Koriat, A., & Goldsmith, M. (1994). Memory in naturalistic and laboratory contexts: Distinguishing the accuracy-oriented and
quantity-oriented approaches to memory assessment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 297–315. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.123.3.297.

Koriat, A., & Goldsmith, M. (1996). Monitoring and control processes in the strategic regulation of memory. Psychological Review,
103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.103.3.490. 490-471.

Lamb, M. E., Orbach, Y., Hershkowitz, I., Esplin, P. W., & Horowitz, D. (2007). A structured forensic interview protocol improves
the quality and informativeness of investigative interviews with children: A review of research using the NICHD
investigating interview protocol. Child Abuse and Neglect, 31, 1201–1231. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2007.03.021.

Lampinen, J. M., Copeland, S. M., & Neuschatz, J. S. (2001). Recollections of things schematic: Room schemas revisited. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1211–1222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.27.5.1211.

Lampinen, J. M., Leding, J. K., Reed, K. B., & Odegard, T. N. (2006). Global gist extraction in children and adults. Memory, 14,
952–964. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210601008957.

Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. N. (2005). International affective picture system (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and
instruction manual. Technical report A-6. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 560–572. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-
0285(75)90023-7.

Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (1994). The myth of repressed memory. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Loftus, E. F., Miller, D. G., & Burns, H. J. (1978). Semantic integration of verbal information into visual memory. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 19–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.1.19.
Lyons, K. E., Ghetti, S., & Cornoldi, C. (2010). Age differences in the contribution of recollection and familiarity to false-memory

formation: A new paradigm to examine developmental reversals. Developmental Science, 13, 355–362. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00889.

Marin, B. V., Holmes, D. L., Guth, M., & Kovac, P. (1979). The potential of children as eyewitnesses. Law and Human Behavior, 3,
295–305.

McAuliff, B. D., Nicholson, E., & Ravanshenas, D. (2007, March). Hypothetically speaking: Can expert testimony improve jurors’
understanding of developmental differences in suggestibility? Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for
Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.

McAuliff, B. D., & Kovera, M. B. (2007). Estimating the effects of misleading information on witness accuracy: Can experts tell
jurors something they don’t already know? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21, 849–870. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1301.

McGough, L. S. (1993). Child witnesses: Fragile voices in the American legal system. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Metzger, R. L., Warren, A. R., Price, J. D., Reed, A. W., Shelton, J., & Williams, D. (2008). Do children ‘‘DRM’’ like adults? False

memory production in children. Developmental Psychology, 44, 169–181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.1.169.
Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Schreiber, T. A. (1999). The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment

norms. Unpublished manuscript. Tampa: University of South Florida.
Neoh, J., & Mellor, D. (2009). Professional issues related to allegations and assessment of child sexual abuse in the context of

family court litigation. Psychiatry, Psychology, and Law, 16, 303–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13218710902852883.
Odegard, T. N., Cooper, C. M., Lampinen, J. M., Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (2009). Children’s eyewitness memory for multiple

real-life events. Child Development, 80, 1877–1890. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01373.x.
Odegard, T. N., Holliday, R. E., Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2008). Attention to global-gist processing eliminates age effects in

false memories. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99, 96–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp. 2007.08.007.
Otgaar, H., Peters, M., & Howe, M. L. (2012). Dividing attention lowers children’s but increases adults’ false memories. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38, 204–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025160.
Otgaar, H., & Smeets, T. (2010). Adaptive memory: Survival processing increases both true and false memory in adults and

children. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36, 1010–1016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/
a0019402.

Otgaar, H., Verschuere, B., Meijer, E. H., & van Oorsouw, K. (2012). The origin of children’s implanted false memories: Memory
traces or compliance. Acta Psychologia, 139, 397–403.

Payne, D. G., Elie, C. J., Blackwell, J. M., & Neuschatz, J. S. (1996). Memory illusions: Recalling, recognizing, and recollecting events
that never occurred. Journal of Memory & Language, 35, 261–285. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0015.

Paz-Alonso, P. M., Ghetti, S., Donohue, S. E., Goodman, G. S., & Bunge, S. A. (2008). Neurodevelopmental correlates of true and
false recognition. Cerebral Cortex, 18, 2208–2216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhm246.

Petersen, R. C. (2004). Mild cognitive impairment as a diagnostic entity. Journal of Internal Medicine, 256, 183–194. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2004.01388.x.

Pezdek, K., & Roe, C. (1995). The effect of memory trace strength on suggestibility. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60,
116–128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp. 1995.1034.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03214352

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00344.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1519

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(90)90069-C

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2011.01.001

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2011.01.001

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.123.3.297

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.103.3.490

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2007.03.021

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.27.5.1211

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210601008957

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90023-7

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90023-7

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.1.19

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00889

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1301

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.1.169

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13218710902852883

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01373.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2007.08.007

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025160

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0019402

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0019402

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhm246

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2004.01388.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1034

266 C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267

Pezdek, K., & Roe, C. (1997). The suggestibility of children’s memory for being touched: Planting, erasing, and changing
memories. Law and Human Behavior, 21, 95–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1024870127516.

Pipe, M. E., Gee, S., Wilson, J. C., & Egerton, J. M. (1999). Children’s recall 1 or 2 years after an event. Developmental Psychology, 35,
781–789. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.35.3.781.

Poole, D. A., & Lamb, M. E. (1998). Investigative interviews of children. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Poole, D. A., & Lindsay, D. S. (1995). Interviewing preschoolers: Effects of nonsuggestive techniques, parental coaching, and

leading questions on reports of nonexperienced events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 129–154. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1035.

Poole, D. A., & Lindsay, D. S. (2001). Children’s eyewitness reports after exposure to misinformation from parents. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7, 27–50.

Poole, D. A., & White, L. T. (1991). Effects of question repetition on the eyewitness testimony of children and adults.
Developmental Psychology, 27, 975–986. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.6.975.

Principe, G. F., Guiliano, S., & Root, C. (2008). Rumor mongering and remembering: How rumors originating in children’s
inferences can affect memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99, 135–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.
2007.10.009.

Quas, J. A., Qin, J. J., Schaaf, J. M., & Goodman, G. S. (1997). Individual differences in children’s and adults’ suggestibility and false
event memory. Learning and Individual Differences, 9, 359–390. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1041-6080(97)90014-5.

Reyna, V. F. (1996). Conceptions of memory development, with implications for reasoning and decision making. Annals of Child
Development, 12, 87–118.

Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (1995). Fuzzy-trace theory: An interim synthesis. Learning and Individual Differences, 7, 1–75. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/1041-6080(95)90031-4.

Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (2011). Dual processes in decision making and developmental neuroscience: A fuzzy-trace model.
Developmental Review, 31, 180–206.

Reyna, V. F., Holliday, R., & Marche, T. (2002). Explaining the development of false memories. Developmental Review, 22,
436–489. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0273-2297(02)00003-5.

Reyna, V. F., & Kiernan, B. (1994). Development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition: Effects of lexical
familiarity, semantic content, encoding instructions, and retention interval. Developmental Psychology, 30, 178–191. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.30.2.178.

Reyna, V. F., & Kiernan, B. (1995). Children’s memory and interpretation of psychological metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic
Activity, 10, 309–331.

Reyna, V. F., Mills, B., Estrada, S., & Brainerd, C. J. (2007). False memory in children: Data, theory, and legal implications. In M. P.
Toglia, J. D. Read, D. F. Ross, & R. C. L. Lindsay (Eds.), Handbook of eyewitness psychology (pp. 479–507). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Rivers, S. E., Reyna, V. F., & Mills, B. (2008). Risk taking under the influence: A fuzzy-trace theory of emotion in adolescence.
Developmental Review, 28, 107–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.11.002.

Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented on lists. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803–814. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803.

Roediger, H. L., III, Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., & Gallo, D. A. (2001). Factors that determine false recall: A multiple regression
analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 385–405. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03196177.

Ross, D. F., Marsil, D. F., Benton, T. R., Hoffman, R., Warren, A. R., Lindsay, R. C. L., et al (2006). Children’s susceptibility to
misidentifying a familiar bystander from a lineup: When younger is better. Law and Human Behavior, 30, 249–257. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9034-z.

Rubin, D. C., & Talarico, J. M. (2009). A comparison of dimensional models of emotion: Evidence from emotions, prototypical
events, autobiographical memories, and words. Memory, 8, 802–808.

Schneider, W., & Bjorklund, D. F. (1998). Memory. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn, & R. S. Siegler (Eds.). Handbook of child psychology:
Cognition, perception, and language (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 467–522). New York: Wiley.

Schneider, W., & Pressley, M. (1997). Memory development between two and twenty. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Erlbaum.
Seamon, J. G., Luo, C. R., Kopecky, J. J., Price, C. A., Rothschild, L., Fung, N. S., et al (2002). Are false memories more difficult to

forget than accurate memories? The effect of retention interval on recall and recognition. Memory & Cognition, 30,
1054–1064. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03194323.

Sloutsky, V. M., & Fisher, A. V. (2004a). Induction and categorization in young children: A similarity-based model. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 166–188.

Sloutsky, V. M., & Fisher, A. V. (2004b). When development and learning decrease memory. Psychological Science, 15, 553–558.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00718.x.

Small, W. S. (1896). Suggestibility of children. Pedagogical Seminary, 13, 176.
Sommers, M. S., & Lewis, B. P. (1999). Who really lives next door: Creating false memories with phonological neighbors. Journal

of Memory and Language, 40, 83–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1998.2614.
Stern, W. (1910). Abstracts of lectures on the psychology of testimony and the study of individuality. American Journal of

Psychology, 21, 270–282.
Storbeck, J., & Clore, G. L. (2005). With sadness comes accuracy; with happiness, false memory: Mood and the false memory

effect. Psychological Science, 16, 785–791. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01615.x.
Sugrue, K., & Hayne, H. (2006). False memories produced by children and adults in the DRM paradigm. Applied Cognitive

Psychology, 20, 625–631. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp. 1214.
Sugrue, K., Strange, D., & Hayne, H. (2009). False memories in the DRM paradigm age-related differences in lure activation and

source monitoring. Experimental Psychology, 56, 354–360.
The Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives (2006). Federal rules of evidence. Washington, DC: United States

Government Printing Office.
Toglia, M. P., & Battig, W. F. (1978). Handbook of semantic word norms. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1971). Retrieval processes in recognition memory: Effects of associative context. Journal of

Experimental Psychology, 87, 116–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0030186.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1024870127516

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.35.3.781

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1035

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.6.975

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2007.10.009

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2007.10.009

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1041-6080(97)90014-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/1041-6080(95)90031-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0273-2297(02)00003-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.30.2.178

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.11.002

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03196177

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9034-z

http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03194323

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00718.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1998.2614

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01615.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1214

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0030186

C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna / Developmental Review 32 (2012) 224–267 267

Verkoeijen, P. P. J. L., & Bouwmeester, S. (in press). Gist processing in free recall and recognition: Latent variable modeling of
children’s and adults’ true and false memories. Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Varendonck, J. (1911). Les temoignages d’enfants dans un process retent. Archives de Psychologie, 11, 129–171.
Weekes, B. S., Hamilton, S., Oakhill, J., & Holliday, R. E. (2007). False recollection in children with reading comprehension

difficulties. Cognition, 106, 222–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.01.005.
Wells, G. L., Small, M., Penrod, S., Malpass, R. S., Fulero, S. M., & Brimacombe, C. A. E. (1998). Eyewitness identification

procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior, 23, 603–648. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1023/A:1025750605807.

Whipple, G. M. (1909). The observer as reporter: A survey of the psychology of testimony. Psychological Bulletin, 6, 153–170.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0071084.

Wilburn, C., & Feeney, A. (2008). Do development and learning really decrease memory? On similarity and category-based
induction in adults and children. Cognition, 106, 1451–1464. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.018.

Wimmer, M. C., & Howe, M. L. (2011). Are children’s memory illusions created differently from those of adults? Evidence from
levels-of-processing and divided attention paradigms. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107, 31–49. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.jecp. 2010.03.003.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.01.005

http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1025750605807

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0071084

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.018

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.03.003

• Reliability of children’s testimony in the era of developmental reversals

Introduction
Theoretical reasons for developmental reversals
Core lines of evidence
Developmental reversals in the DRM illusion
2002–2005
2006–Present
Afterword
Developmental reversals in false memory for categorized materials
Developmental reversals in false memory for complex and forensic events
Developmental reversals in spontaneous false memories
Developmental reversals in implanted false memories
Comment
Developmental reversals in emotional false memory
Testing explanatory principles
Necessity interactions
Sufficiency interactions
Gist cuing
Story context
Summary and interpretive comments
Concluding comments
Memory suggestion
Emotional false memory
Adolescence
Epilogue
Acknowledgment
References