Children's recall of projective stories.

Abstract

Children in the second and third grades were asked to generate a series of projective stories, and were tested for the accuracy of their immediate recall and long-term recall following a delay of two months. A yoked Control group was tested for recall accuracy after having learned the same story material by rote. Previous research has produced mixed results regarding the accuracy of children's long-term story recall, with some indication that children, compared with adults, may be more prone to forgetting, distortion, and to memory improvement (hypermnesia) as well. It was not clear if these same tendencies would be seen in the recall of stories that children had made up themselves from their own imaginations. While there are indications of a Generation effect of enhanced recall accuracy for the story-generators at immediate recall, the pattern of long-term story recall is one of hypermnesia for the Control group only. The employment of a criterion control for productivity response bias in story recall provides a similar finding. Preliminary explanations for the lack of improvement in the long-term recall of projective stories for story-generators are offered.