Browsing by Author "Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair"

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At the Zoo and On the Farm: The Effects of an Initial Interview on Pre-Kindergarten Children's Subsequent Recall and Resistance to Retroactive Interference
(2006-07-18) Pierce, Lauren Esther; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair; Thomas Hess, Committee Member; Jason Osborne, Committee Member
Despite the attention researchers have given to the effects of repeated interviews on eyewitness testimony, relatively few investigations have examined the effects of an initial interview on children's event memory. This study added to the literature by investigating the effects of an initial interview on recall, resistance to retroactive interference, and source monitoring errors. One hundred four-year-old children were engaged in a staged event and were interviewed about this event 4 weeks later. Two between-participant factors, the presence or absence of an initial interview and the administration or lack of administration of a related event during the retention interval, were varied orthogonally. Children in the initial interview group demonstrated greater recall and more elaborations of the target event, regardless of whether or not they had experienced the intervening event. Among the children who were exposed to the intervening event, those who had the initial interview made fewer source monitoring errors than did those who did not have the interview. The findings are interpreted as indicating that an initial interview enhances young children's memory reports by strengthening the memory trace and consolidating the event representation, at least under some conditions.
Deliberate Memory in Three-Year-Old Children: Interrelations among Task Approaches, Working Memory, and Inhibitory Control
(2008-04-24) Turner, Kimberly Ann; Mary Haskett, Committee Member; Shevaun Neupert, Committee Member; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair
Maintaining a Positive Outlook: Developmental Differences in the Use of Subjective Temporal Distance
(2007-11-06) Styers, Mary Koenig; Katherine Klein, Committee Member; Jason Osborne, Committee Member; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair
Adults' use of subjective temporal distance, defined as a psychological distancing mechanism that allows individuals to maintain positive self-views by perceiving threatening events as being farther away in time and affirming events as being closer in time, has been the subject of extensive research attention in recent years. No research to date, however, has examined how children and adolescents utilize subjective temporal distance. This study investigated the extent to which older elementary and middle school students utilize subjective temporal distance as they remember positive and negative academic experiences. One hundred 4th⁄5th graders and 90 7th⁄8th graders provided ratings of their recollections and personal experiences concerning two academic events, receiving a satisfying and a disappointing grade or test score. The participants at both age levels reported that the positive event seemed closer in time than the disappointing event, an effect not explained by the reported actual time since the events. In contrast to expectations, no effects of grade or gender on subjective distance were observed. Further, contrary to prior investigations with adults, there was no relation between global self-worth and subjective distancing. Both the reported emotional intensity of the event and the amount of reported co-rumination with peers influenced subjective distancing. The findings are interpreted as indicating that subjective temporal distance in childhood reflects a different process than the internal, individual coping mechanism observed in adulthood. Further research should examine the role of interactions with adults and peers in children's use of subjective distancing.
Protecting my Self through Language: Developmental Differences in Narrative Accounts following a Self-threatening Experience
(2009-11-02) Styers, Mary Koenig; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair; Thomas Hess, Committee Member; Shevaun Neupert, Committee Member; Jason Osborne, Committee Member
Understanding how adults perceive and respond to threatening situations has been investigated by numerous social psychologists. However, these researchers have neglected to consider the development of these responses. One notable omission is how individuals at different ages use language to protect their sense of self in everyday negative situations. This study investigated cross-sectional differences in responses to everyday problems, conflicts and issues in salient domains of the self. Fifty-five older elementary students, 51 middle school students and 54 college participants each narrated accounts of two recent problematic experiences that differed in their overall importance to the self and provided ratings of their recollections and psychological responses to these experiences. Participants at all age levels reported that the narrated events differed in their overall importance, intensity and self-relevance according to their level of salience to the self. In addition, there were cross-sectional differences in the density of internal states language, and the relationship between language use and subsequent event sequelae varied by age group. For the elementary age group only, participants who used positive reappraisal in their narratives experienced a decrease in importance and participants who used a higher percentage of positive emotion terms sought less assistance following the experience and reported higher levels of cognitive avoidance. For the middle school age group only, usage of positive reappraisal was associated with higher levels of cognitive avoidance of the experience. Finally, for the college age group only, usage of positive reappraisal was associated with lower levels of cognitive avoidance. The findings are interpreted as indicating distinct patterns of responses to self-threat at different points in development. Further research should investigate language differences in developmental responses to self-threatening situations prospectively.
Retrieval Processes in Young Children: A Study of Script-Based Searches
(2003-06-27) Coulbourn, Audrey J; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair
Retrieval processes are studied in young children ages six and nine years old. Research has shown that very young children organize incoming information schematically in script-like structures, and that these children are capable of utilizing some type of retrieval strategy to recall list information. No research to date has investigated the processes children use to recall events from memory. This study investigated the process that children use to recall events from memory, and hypothesized that the process used at recall is based on a script search, similar to the Context-Plus-Index model posited by Reiser (1986). 96 kindergarteners and third graders participated in a '20 Questions' game in which they asked the interviewer questions to determine the five features of two strong-scripted events and two weak-scripted events. The subjects then participated in a script-generation task. Script based searches were evidenced by a correspondence between questions asked during the game task and features of scripts mentioned during the script generation task. The data revealed that kindergarteners did not use scripts to guide their retrieval, and that kindergartners did not appear to have scripts for the events chosen for this study. Third graders showed a tendency to use their scripts for retrieval, had more elaborate scripts than kindergarteners, and also had more successful retrieval searches than did kindergartners.
The Role of Event Plausibility and Age in Children's Recall and Suggestibility.
(2004-11-10) Brown, Benjamin Thomas; Jason Allaire, Committee Member; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair; Daniel Bauer, Committee Member
Although a good deal of research suggests that what we know affects what we remember, very little of this research looks at development through childhood. Children remember more as they grow older (Ornstein, Baker-Ward, Gordon & Merritt, 1997). As children gain more experience and expertise, they may also be developing an understanding of event plausibility. It was predicted that event plausibility moderates the relationships between knowledge and recall and between knowledge and suggestibility. Fuzzy trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) has shown that older children are better than their younger counterparts in using gist memory. Gist memories are integrated into prior knowledge, preserving only the central concepts of an event. If older children rely more on gist, which is meaningfully connected to knowledge, it may explain why they would be better able to understand event plausibility. The present research provided younger and older children with knowledge of a novel animal, namely a chinchilla. These children were later read a story about one such chinchilla. This story featured events that would be plausible or implausible given knowledge of the animal. Children were then tested for the recall and suggestibility for the story one day or one week later. In general, plausible events were better recalled than implausible events, and plausible misleading questions led to more suggestibility than implausible questions. As would be expected, age served as a good predictor of recall and suggestibility, with older children displaying better recall and decreased susceptibility to suggestion than younger children. As expected, delay also served as a good predictor of memory and suggestibility, with better recall and less suggestibility in the short delay than the longer delay. There was some evidence that knowledge was activated to a greater extent in the older children as they made their memory judgments. Older children were more susceptible to plausible suggestion over time and less susceptible to implausible suggestion, while younger children displayed increases in suggestibility to both question types. Due to the limitations of the current design, a full understanding of how age, delay, and plausibility interact is still to come. Future research may shed further light on how an understanding of event plausibility develops across the childhood years, and how this development affects children's recall and suggestibility.
The Sound Barrier: Two-Year-Old Children's Use of Newly Acquired Words to Describe Preverbal Memories
(2004-03-23) Dillard, S. Gwynn; Daniel Bauer, Committee Member; James Kalat, Committee Member; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair
One of the proposed causes of childhood amnesia, the relative paucity of adults' memories for events occurring before the age of four, is the inability to verbally access preverbal memories. Although recent findings by Simcock and Hayne (2002) are consistent with this possibility, other researchers (Peterson & Rideout, 1998; Bauer, Wenner, & Kroupina, 2002) report some verbal access to memories acquired before the onset of productive language. The present research used the paradigm of color naming to further examine whether 2-year-old children can use newly acquired words to describe their preverbal memories. The method extended previous work by directly examining the acquisition of verbal labels and providing contextual support for memory performance. Participants learned a task requiring selecting a specific color. Those without color labels were taught them through eight structured sessions of age-appropriate color learning activities. After two months, the children's memory for the event was assessed verbally, then with visual cues, and finally through re-enactment. There were no group differences in implicit memory for the event (Fisher's Exact Test, p=0.31); children who knew the target label at encoding (n=20, mean age at recall 31.2 months), who acquired the label only after the intervention (n=8, M = 31.3 months), and who lacked the label at both pretest and posttest (n=9, M= 29.1 months) performed comparably in the re-enactment condition. Although 12 of 20 children who knew their target color word at the time of encoding could verbally access the memory at the time of recall, only one of 8 children who did not know their target word at encoding but learned it before recall could access the verbal label. However, this child incorrectly re-enacted the event. This research suggests that children cannot independently translate preverbal memories into words even with extensive task support. Therefore, language acquisition may indeed play an important role in the offset of childhood amnesia.
Understanding Socioeconomic Differences in Kindergarteners' School Success: The Influence of Executive Function and Strategic Memory.
(2010-05-20) Turner, Kimberly Ann; Lynne Baker-Ward, Committee Chair; Thomas Hess, Committee Member; Mary Haskett, Committee Member; Hiller Spires, Committee Member; Jason Allaire, Committee Member