Children's long‐term memory for information that is incongruous with their prior knowledge

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Abstract
Seven‐ and 10‐year‐olds listened to a tape‐recorded story. In one version, familiar television characters were described as having attributes that were incongruous with those that the children thought them to have. For example, Six Million Dollar Man was said to be too weak to carry a can of paint. Immediately after hearing the story, half of the children were asked to rate the characters on the basis of their descriptions and behaviour in the story. At this stage there was no evidence of systematic distortions in remembering. However, children who were asked to rate the incongruous characters in the story three weeks later displayed considerable shifts in memory in the direction of their pre‐experimental knowledge of the character's attributes. Long‐term memory for unfamiliar characters in a parallel version of the story showed no such shift, indicating that memory distortion for the incongruous information was influenced by children's prior knowledge and was not the result of random forgetting.

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