Portuguese category norms for children

This study presents Portuguese category norms for children of three different age groups: preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds), second graders (7- to 8-year-olds), and preadolescents (11- to 12-year-olds). Three hundred Portuguese children (100 in each group) completed an exemplar-generation task. Preschoolers generated exemplars for 13 categories, second graders generated exemplars for 17 categories, and preadolescents generated exemplars for 21 categories. For each group, responses within each category were organized according to frequency of production in order to derive exemplar-production norms for sets of tested categories. The results also included information about the number of responses and exemplars, idiosyncratic and inappropriate responses, and commonality and diversity indexes for all the categories. A comparison of these children’s norms with the Portuguese adult norms was also presented. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive

Drawing to Remember: External Support of Older Adults’ Eyewitness Performance

Although healthy aging is accompanied by a general decline in memory functioning, environmental support at retrieval can improve older adults’ (+65 years) episodic remembering. Despite those over the age of 65years representing a growing proportion of the population, few environmental retrieval support methods have been empirically evaluated for use with older witnesses and victims of crime. Here, the efficacy of a novel retrieval technique, the Sketch Mental Reinstatement of Context, is compared with a standard Mental Reinstatement of Context and a no support control (Control). Fifty-one participants witnessed an unexpected live event, and 48 hours later were interviewed using one of three aforementioned techniques. In line with predictions emanating from cognitive theories of aging and the environmental support hypothesis, participants in the Sketch Mental Reinstatement of Context condition recalled significantly more correct information and fewer inaccurate items. The Sketch Mental Reinstatement of Context technique appears to scaffold memory retrieval in an age-appropriate manner during a post-event interview, possibly by encouraging more effortful retrieval and reducing dual-task load. As such, this procedure offers an effective alternative to current approaches, adding to the toolbox of techniques available to forensic and other interviewers