Changes In Fluency Attribution Across Childhood

Although there is ample data about fluency attribution to memory decisions in adults, less is known about the developmental trajectory of the fluency heuristic. In an experiment with children ages 4, 6, and 8, we tested whether attribution changed as a function of age and familiarity. Participants viewed a sequence of familiar and unfamiliar cartoon characters at encoding. During the recognition memory test, half of the items were preceded by a brief (17ms) identical prime. In adults, such primes typically increase the rate of "yes" responses, particularly for lure items. Instead, we found evidence of strong priming effects for targets relative to lures. These effects decreased with age as did the gap in memory for familiar and unfamiliar characters. Collectively, the results of the study provide evidence of perceptual fluency attribution to memory decisions in a way that is similar to conceptual fluency attribution across childhood (Geurten, Lloyd, & Willems, 2017).