Developmental changes in predicting recognition memory for semantically related and unrelated sentences

Examined the development of an awareness (metamemory) of "constructive interference." This is the "fact" that when children and adults are presented a list of semantically related sentences, they later find it more difficult to distinguish old from new instances than when they are presented a list of unrelated sentences. Knowledge of this constructive interference was tested by having 192 11-, 15- and 22-yr-old students first predict recognition and then take an actual recognition test. In independent groups, half of the Ss received lists of semantically related sentences, and half received lists of semantically unrelated sentences. By comparing Ss' predictions with their actual performances across the different groups, it appears that the 11-yr-olds did not comprehend this phenomenon, but the 15- and 22-yr-olds did. That is, older Ss correctly predicted that recognition performance would be poorer for related lists than for unrelated lists. The 11-yr-olds, by contrast, predicted that recognition would be about the same for the 2 kinds of lists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).