New research suggests children who have better memories also tend to be more talented liars.
The research is the first to demonstrate a link between verbal memory and covering up lies, the University of Sheffield reported.
To make their findings, a team of researchers asked six and seven-year-olds not to peak at the answers on the back of a card during a trivia game. A hidden camera allowed the researchers to see who had peaked and who hadn't. They questioned the children on topics such as the color of the answer on the cards, which acted as "entrapment" questions to determine which participants were considered "good liars."
"While parents are usually not too proud when their kids lie, they can at least be pleased to discover that when their children are lying well, it means their children are becoming better at thinking and have good memory skills," said Elena Hoicka, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Psychology. "We already know that adults lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes, so it's interesting to know why some children are able to tell more porkies than others. We'll now be looking to move the research forward to discover more about how children first learn to lie."
Verbal working memory is the number of words a person can remember at once, while visuo-spatial working memory is the number of images one can remember. The study showed good liars tended to perform better on verbal working memory tests compared to bad liars. This could be because in order to be an efficient liar and maintain a cover story, one must be able to keep track of a lot of information. There was not observed to be a difference in visuo-spatial working scores between the good and bad liars, suggesting visual information is not as important in lying.
"This research shows that thought processes, specifically verbal working memory, are important to complex social interactions like lying because the children needed to juggle multiple pieces of information while keeping the researcher's perspective in mind," said Tracy Alloway, project lead from the University of North Florida.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
