People often use recollection to avoid false memories. At least two types of recollection-based monitoring processes can be identified in the literature. Recall-to-reject is based on the recall of logically inconsistent information (which disqualifies the false event from having occurred), whereas the distinctiveness heuristic is based on the failure to recall to-be-expected information (which is diagnostic of non-occurrence). We attempted to investigate these hypothetical monitoring processes in a single task, as a first step at delineating the functional relationship between them. By design, participants could reject familiar lures by (1) recalling them from a to-be-excluded list (recall-to-reject) or (2) realising the absence of expected picture recollections (the distinctiveness heuristic). Both manipulations reduced false recognition in young adults, suggesting that these two types of monitoring were deployed on the same test. In contrast, older adults had limited success in reducing false recognition with either manipulation, indicating deficits in recollection-based monitoring processes. Depending on how a retrieval task is structured, attempts to use one monitoring process might interfere with another, especially in older adults.

Young infants are sensitive to self-directed social actions, but do they appreciate the intentional, target-directed nature of such behaviors? We addressed this question by investigating infants’ understanding of social gaze in third-party interactions (N = 104). Ten-month-old infants discriminated between two people in mutual versus averted gaze, and expected a person to look at her social partner during conversation. In contrast, 9-month-old infants showed neither ability, even when provided with information that highlighted the gazer's social goals. These results indicate considerable improvement in infants’ abilities to analyze the social gaze of others towards the end of their first year, which may relate to their appreciation of gaze as both a social and goal-directed action.

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3-to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the developmental origins and conceptual structure of power judgments based on physical appearance. At 3 years of age, children already associated physical strength with expansive posture; soon after, expansive postures also supported judgments of normative authority and were joined by similar judgments about masculine facial structure. By the age of 4, children also matched high-and low-power versions of faces and postures together, indicating that they draw connections between different aspects of more or less powerful appearance. The complexity and timing of these changes highlights limitations in current accounts of the origins of adults' intuitions about powerful appearances. This study documents several novel developmental patterns that generate new hypotheses about the mechanisms that support the emergence of children's intuitions.

National traumatic events can produce extremely vivid memories. Using a questionnaire administered during telephone interviews, the authors investigated emotional responses to, and memory for. the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and healthy older adults in the initial weeks following the event and again 3-4 months later. There were several notable findings. First, patients with AD showed less memory than patients with MCI and older adults. Second, patients with AD, but not patients with MCI or older adults, appeared to retain more memory for personal versus factual information. Third, patients with AD and older adults did not differ in the intensity of their reported emotional responses to the attacks, whereas patients with MCI reported relatively less intense emotional responses. Last, distortions of memory for personal information were frequent for all participants but were more common in patients with AD.