Children's Memory Confusions to Be Topic of Skidmore's Moseley Lecture For more than 20 years, cognitive psychologist Mary Ann Foley has studied children's memory confusions and has observed some surprising findings about the accuracy of their memories. Her research will be the topic of the annual Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture at Skidmore.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Foley began her pioneering research on children's source monitoring while she was a doctoral student in the early 1980s. She was intrigued by the common belief that young children had rich fantasy lives, and therefore had trouble distinguishing between perceiving and thinking. People presumed that these difficulties led children to experience memory confusions, leaving them unable to accurately distinguish between memories for actual events and imagined events. Initially she set out to test the assumptions of developmental psychologists and legal experts that the memories of young children couldn't be trusted. Foley conducted research to see how well young children could differentiate between fact and fantasy.