Developmental Comparisons of the Ability to Discriminate Between Memories for Symbolic Play Enactments

Children's memory errors reveal the kinds of processing that may occur during source-monitoring judgments. After symbolically enacting everyday actions using toys or substitutes, preschoolers were more likely to claim they played with a toy when a substitute was involved as the instrument of action than the reverse (Experiments 1-3). We interpret this bias as evidence for the importance of the functional similarity between actions for children's source-monitoring judgments.