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Department of Psychology

New research by Dr Lucy Cheke and Professor Nicky Clayton, has this week been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. The article, which may lead to an improvement in the way episodic memory in children is studied, is entitled, 'The six blind men and the elephant: Are episodic memory tasks tests of different things or different tests of the same thing?'. By designing an ingenious study, involving four putative tests of episodic memory, Dr Cheke and Prof. Clayton showed that different episodic memory tasks produced very divergent results even when given to the same children. They concluded that these tests are indeed testing the same underlying cognitive process, but from very different perspectives. They suggest that these differences are too great to justify their continued use as equivalent tests, but that by combining different tests into a single episodic test battery, a more accurate assessment of variations in episodic memory might be possible.

The paper is open access, and is available here. Lead author, Dr Lucy Cheke, has also provided a presentation alongside the article.