Children’s earwitness memory : The influence of age and emotionality

Abstract

The present study investigated children’s abilities as earwitnesses, and examined the influence of age, individual differences, and the emotionality of the auditive stimuli on memory for environmental sound events. Sixty children participated in the study. Twenty-five children aged 7-8 years and 35 children aged 9-11 years were presented two environmental sound events: a car crashing and someone brushing their teeth. The car crash event was postulated to be emotional, and the teeth brushing event neutral. The sound events compiled six individual environmental sounds each, and the participants passively listened to the sound events through a headset. Participants subsequently completed the WASI. After a two week delay, children performed a cued recall, recognition and memory source monitoring task. Children in both age groups recalled and recognized significantly more sounds from the emotional sound event than the neutral sound event. The oldest children recalled significantly more sounds than the youngest children, but no significant age differences were evident in the recognition and source monitoring tasks. In addition, a correlation analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between Full Scale IQ and performance in the cued recall task. Results generally complied with previous literature examining memory in the visual modality, and indicated that children were moderately accurate earwitnesses.