Next time, maybe you’ll believe your kid. Small children apparently have better memories than their parents, researchers reported on Thursday.
They found a 5-year-old could beat most adults on a recognition memory test, at least under specific conditions. And the reason is that adults know too much.
“It’s one case where knowledge can actually decrease memory accuracy,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, who led the study.
For their study, researchers showed 77 young children and 71 college students pictures of cats, bears and birds. The study was designed to make the volunteers look at the pictures but they did not know what was being tested.
Writing in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers said the children, with an average age of 5, were accurate 31 percent of the time in identifying pictures of animals they had seen earlier, while the adults were accurate only 7 percent of the time.
The reason, Sloutsky believes, is that children used a different form of reasoning called similarity-based induction when they analyzed the pictures. When shown subsequent pictures of animals they looked carefully to see if the animal looked similar to the original cat.
Adults, however, used category-based induction — once they determined whether the animal pictured was a cat, they paid no more attention. So when they were tested later, the adults didn’t recognize the pictures as well as the children.
“The adults didn’t care about a specific cat — all they wanted to know was whether the animal was a cat or not,” Sloutsky said.
And when taught to use category-based induction like adults, the children’s ability to remember dropped to the level of adults.
