Development of Reality Monitoring for Performed and Imagined Actions

Abstract

Young children are frequently assumed to be poorer than older children at remembering the sources of their memories, although recent studies have shown that this increased confusion may occur only when they have to distinguish between what they did and what they imagined doing. The present study compares children of 6, 9, and 12 years and shows that, over a wide range of action classes, 6-year-olds have more trouble discriminating between memories for performed and imagined actions than older children both when the child is the actor and the imagined actor and when someone else is the actor and the imagined actor. These results suggest that young children have particular difficulty in distinguishing memory sources whenever the same person is involved in actual and imagined actions.