Remembering beyond the edges of a view: Boundary Extension in preschool children and adults
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Boundary Extension (BE) is a memory error in which people remember seeing more of a scene than was originally viewed (Intraub & Richardson, 1989). The studies presented here were designed to test the hypothesis that preschool-aged children (4-5 year olds) experience BE. Experiment 1 used a drawing task in which children (N=29) and adults (N=26) viewed the same scene-photograph and then drew it from memory, revealing BE in both groups. Experiments 2 through 4 tested BE without relying on participants' drawing ability. Experiment 2 introduced a two-alternative forced choice recognition task in which children (N=26) and adults (N=26) were shown a photograph and upon its removal they selected which of two test photographs matched what they saw before (the choice always included the same view and a different view - either closer or more wide-angled). Errors usually involved selection of the wider view, signifying BE. In Experiment 3, this same task was modified to determine if children's (N=26) errors reflected a selection bias for the wider-angle view rather than true BE. The selection bias hypothesis was ruled out. In Experiment 4, the forced choice task (used in Experiment 2) was used with more complex multi-object scenes and showed that children (N=26) again, exhibited BE . Adults' (N=26) performance in Experiment 4, however was at ceiling; they rarely made errors - probably because the scene were more wide-angled than the single object views used earlier. However when the multi-object scenes were presented more briefly to adults (N=26), in Experiment 5, they too exhibited BE. A selection bias task was given to both children and adults (Experiments 4 and 5), and again, selection bias was ruled out. Results from Experiments 1, 2, 4 and 5 indicated that like adults, children experienced BE and the two-alternative forced choice task (from Experiments 2, 4 and 5) can be used to answer other questions about scene and spatial memory with young children in future research.