Kids have better memory than adults: Research

Small children apparently have better memories than their parents, researchers reported. They found a 5-year-old could beat most adults on a acknowledgment memory test, at least under specific conditions. And the reason is that adults know too much. "It's one case where knowledge can actually decrease memory accuracy," said Vladimir Sloutsky, director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, who led the study. For their study, researchers showed 77 young children and 71 college students, pictures of cats, bears and birds. The study was designed to make the volunteers look at the pictures but they did not know what was being tested. The researchers were of the view that the children, with an average age of 5, were accurate 31 percent of the time in identifying pictures of animals they had seen earlier, while the adults were accurate only 7 percent of the time. "The adults didn't care about a specific cat all they wanted to know was whether the animal was a cat or not," Sloutsky said.