In the 1980's, a spate of high profile child abuse convictions gave way to heightened concern about false memory reports given by children. Take, for example, the case of Kelly Michaels, a preschool teacher who was convicted on 115 counts of sexual abuse based on the testimony of 20 of her pupils. After serving seven years of her 47 year sentence, Michaels' conviction was overturned after the techniques used to interview the children were shown to be coercive and highly suggestive.

Since then, a sizeable literature on children's false memories has accumulated and until recently, the picture that had emerged was quite consistent: false memories of events were found to decrease with age throughout childhood and adolescence. In other words, as we grow into adulthood, our memory accuracy improves.

However, psychologists Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna of Cornell University believe that the relationship between age and memory accuracy may not be so simple. Drawing upon fuzzy-trace theory — the popular psychological theory that humans encode information on a continuum from verbatim to "fuzzy" traces that convey a general meaning — Brainerd and Reyna predicted that false memories may actually increase with age under certain circumstances. In other words, adults would have less accurate memories than children. [read more]