Acceso usuarios
Hilary Horn Ratner
Perspectives on reality monitoring and sociocultural learning were integrated in four studies of children's memory of contributions to the outcomes of collaborative exchanges. Children made collages with an adult, and were later surprised with a reality-monitoring task in which they were asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage. In three of the four studies, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they contributed pieces that the adult actually contributed rather than the reverse (Experiments 1–3). This bias was interpreted as evidence for appropriation, a process in which individuals adopt another person's actions as their own. The extent to which children committed misattribution errors depended on their involvement as decision makers (Experiments 1 and 3) and on the outcomes of the collages themselves (Experiment 2). Importantly, misattribution errors were not simply an expression of encoding failures or response biases (Experiment 4). Implications of these findings for children's memory and learning are discussed.
