Anticipation and Source-Monitoring Errors: Children's Memory for Collaborative Activities

Empathy, theory of mind, and individual differences in the appropriation bias among 4- and 5-year-olds

“…It has been argued that collaborative activities encourage children to anticipate and appraise their partner's moves from the self's own perspective, provoking erroneous claims of responsibility for such moves during subsequent memory retrieval (Foley & Ratner, 1998;Foley et al, 2002;Sommerville & Hammond, 2007). Our finding that elevated empathy was associated with greater susceptibility to appropriation errors is in accord with this claim because it suggests that such errors occur when children take on-board the mental experience of their partner and internalize that experience as one of their own.…”

“…More broadly, investigations of the appropriation bias in young children complement a burgeoning literature on the role of shared task representations in action coordination among adult participants, a literature that is yielding important insights into the impact of interpersonal relations on shared intentionality (see review by Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011). Whereas previous research has documented the conditions conducive to producing the appropriation bias and the nature of its developmental trajectory (Foley & Ratner, 1998;Foley et al, 1993Foley et al, , 2002, the purpose of the current investigation was to explore individual differences in children's susceptibility to the bias, specifically, as a function of their empathy (i.e., emotional responsiveness to other people) and theory of mind (i.e., cognitive insight into other people's intentions and beliefs, including false beliefs).…”

Helping Children Enter Into Another's Experiences: The Look and Feel of It

“…This error pattern is robust, observed in more than 20 studies, and follows the completion of a number of different kinds of collaborative tasks including collage making (e.g., Foley et al, 1993), search tasks , categorization tasks , arithmetic problems (Calin-Jageman & Ratner, 2000), and object construction tasks (Sommerville & Hammond, 2007). Moreover, this error pattern is observed across numerous encoding (Foley & Ratner, 1996;Foley et al, 1993;Foley et al, 2002) and test conditions (Foley & Ratner, 1998a;Sommerville & Hammond) and does not result from an egocentric bias or from a more 218 FOLEY, RATNER, AND GENTES general response bias to report ''me'' when in doubt (Foley & Ratner, 1996, 1998aFoley et al, 2002).…”

“…The focus of the experiments reported here is to identify features that may help children ''enter into'' the experience of another person and influence memory for the interaction as well as learning. Foley, Ratner, and colleagues have explored aspects of the internalization process by studying children's source memory for who contributes what to the outcomes of collaborative tasks (Foley & Ratner, 1996, 1998a, 2001Foley, Ratner, & Passalacqua, 1993;Foley, Ratner, & House, 2002;Ratner et al, 2002). In these studies, children and adults take turns completing a shared activity.…”

“…While watching their partners, children are thought to anticipate the partners' contributions while waiting their turn and then later misremember self-anticipations as actual self-contributions to the collaboration. This emphasis on the role of anticipation garners considerable support from studies in which task features that reduce or expand the child's opportunities for anticipation are manipulated (Foley & Ratner, 1996, 1998aFoley et al, 2002). For instance, when anticipation is precluded by altering task features related to the unfolding of the activity, such as concealing a model, or changing the timing of the child's contributions to the activity, the error to report I did it is considerably reduced or eliminated altogether.…”