Helping children to remember: The influence of object cues on children's accounts of a real event.

Examined the effects of reinstating objects from an event on 6- and 9-year-old children's reports of the event in which they had either participated or observed. Half of the 95 children were interviewed twice, 10 days and 10 weeks after the event (Group 1), and the remaining children were interviewed a single time, 10 weeks after (Group 2). Following free recall, prompted recall and direct questions were accompanied by objects from the event and distractors for half the children. The effect of the delay on free recall was ameliorated by the prior interview for older but not younger children. Objects attenuated age differences in prompted recall for participants and enhanced accuracy in response to questions. Objects also led to more errors at the long delay. Analyses based on signal detection theory indicated that both response strategy and memory-related factors contributed to developmental changes in compliance with misleading questions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Human figure drawings and children’s recall of touching.

In 2 studies, children ages 3 to 7 years were asked to recall a series of touches that occurred during a previous staged event. The recall interview took place 1 week after the event in Study 1 and immediately after the event in Study 2. Each recall interview had 2 sections: In 1 section, children were given human figure drawings (HFDs) and were asked to show where the touching took place; in the other section, the same questions were asked without the HFDs (verbal condition). Children were randomly assigned to 2 different conditions: HFD 1st/verbal 2nd or verbal 1st/HFD 2nd. There were 2 major findings. First, HFDs elicited more errors than the verbal condition when used to probe for information that the child had already been asked. Second, regardless of interview method, children had poor recall of the touches even when these occurred minutes before the interview. It is suggested that cognitive mechanisms involving memory and semantics underlie children’s poor recall of touching in both verbal and HFD conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of discrete emotions on young children's suggestibility.

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child completed a task to try to win the prize. The outcome of the child's effort was manipulated in order to elicit sadness, anger, or happiness. Children's emotions did not affect story recall, but children were more vulnerable to misleading questions about the stories when sad than when angry or happy. In Experiment 2, a story was presented and emotions were elicited using an autobiographical recall task. Children responded to misleading questions and then recalled the story for a different interviewer. Again, children's emotions did not affect the amount of story information recalled correctly, but sad children incorporated more information from misleading questions during recall than did angry or happy children. Sad children's greater suggestibility is discussed in terms of the differing problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of prior knowledge and repeated questioning on children's long-term retention of the details of a pediatric examination.

Children's recall of the details of pediatric examinations was examined over the course of a 6-month interval. Although the 83 4- to 7-year-old participants reported a substantial amount of information at each assessment, performance declined over time, dropping sharply over the course of 3 months but then remaining constant out to the final interview at 6 months. As expected, older children provided more total information than younger children did and reported a greater proportion of the event components in response to general rather than specific questions. However, comparable patterns of remembering and forgetting over time were observed at each age level. In addition, no effects of repeated questioning--in the form of an interview at 3 months for half of the children--were observed on performance at the 6-month assessment. Moreover, children's prior knowledge about routine doctor visits was assessed before the checkup for half of the participants at each age and was associated with initial but not delayed recall. Although knowledge increased with age as expected, it nonetheless affected recall over and above the influence of age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive interviewing procedures and suggestibility in children's recall

In this study the authors examine the effects of procedures adapted from the cognitive interview of R. E. Geiselman, R.P. Fisher, D.P. MacKinnon, and H.L. Holland (1985) on children's recall following exposure to misleading suggestions. Children aged 5-7 years and 9-11 years saw a videotaped story and were presented with misleading or neutral information concerning story details. All were later given free- and cued-recall tests preceded by standard interview instructions or instructions that reinstated the encoding context and encouraged exhaustive reporting. Increased recall accuracy was found following cognitive interview instructions. Both age groups were susceptible to misleading suggestions, but susceptibility was unaffected by interview type. The authors discuss the implications for interviewing child witnesses.     

The incredible (and sometimes incredulous) child witness: Child eyewitnesses' sensitivity to source credibility cues.

Witnesses who receive misleading postevent information usually perform more poorly on memory tests than do witnesses who receive only unbiased information. This effect is especially pronounced for young children. For adults, the credibility of the source of the misleading information moderates this effect; misinformation presented by a credible source impairs performance to a greater degree than does misinformation presented by a noncredible source. In the present experiment, preschool children listened to a story accompanied by several illustrations. Later, they watched a videotape of a child, a credible adult, or a discredited adult answering questions about the story. For some children, the person in the videotape provided misleading information. The children's memory reports were impaired only when misinformation was presented by the credible adult, indicating that even young children are sensitive to source credibility cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context and cue cards in young children's testimony: A comparison of brief narrative elaboration and context reinstatement.

In a comparison of interview procedures that aimed to assist retrieval strategies in children's event recall, 72 children aged 4-6 years were questioned about a witnessed event. Context reinstatement and brief narrative elaboration (an abbreviated version of K. J. Saywitz and L. Snyder's [1996] procedure) produced similar levels of correct recall, and both elicited more correct recall than did a control condition, with no increase in errors. Combining these procedures did not further improve performance. The superiority of narrative elaboration over the control group was evident in free recall and did not depend on explicit prompting with cue cards. These findings suggest that incorporating brief narrative elaboration training in investigative interviews with children may, like context reinstatement, be a valuable mnemonic aid. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in verbal and nonverbal memory during early childhood.

In the present experiment, age-related changes in verbal and nonverbal memory performance by 2- to 4-year-old children were assessed. All children participated in the same unique event, and their memory of that event was assessed after a 24-hr delay. Overall, children's performance on each memory measure increased as a function of age. Furthermore, children's performance on both the verbal and nonverbal memory tests was related to their language ability; children with more advanced language skills reported more during the verbal interview and exhibited superior nonverbal memory relative to children with less advanced language skills. Finally, children's verbal recall of the event lagged behind both their nonverbal recall and their general verbal skill. It is hypothesized that despite large strides in language acquisition, preschool-age children continue to rely primarily on nonverbal representations of past events. The findings have important implications for the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The benefits of peer collaboration on strategy use, metacognitive casual attribution, and recall

This study examined the benefits of a peer collaborative activity on cognitive strategy use and effectiveness, and on metacognitive understanding of strategy use. Children's knowledge about the effectiveness of the sorting strategy grouped them into lower and higher metacognitive understanding. Treatment group triads, consisting of children with lower and higher levels of metacognitive understanding, were given a collaborative recall task. Results indicated that interaction with children working at a higher level of metacognitive knowledge, in conjunction with directions to explicitly discuss strategies, increased strategy use and induced higher levels of metacognitive thinking in children who had been operating at lower levels of metacognitive thinking. overall, children's use of the sorting strategy and recall performance improved as a function of treatment group membership. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Instruction begins in the home: Relations between parental instruction and children's self-regulation in the classroom.

The study examined the effectiveness of 3 aspects of parental instruction for predicting children's self-regulation in school. Fathers, mothers, and their children (52 families) were visited in their homes the summer before the child entered 3rd grade. Metacognitive content (task and strategy information), manner of instruction (small steps at an appropriate pace), and emotional support were coded from parents' instructions to their children for a problem-solving task. Children's self-regulatory behaviors in the classroom were assessed the following school year. Two patterns of relations were observed. Manner of instruction predicted children's attention to instructions and help-seeking in the classroom. Metacognitive content of instructions did not predict these aspects of self-regulation. In contrast, metacognitive content of instructions presented in an understandable manner with emotional support predicted children's monitoring and metacognitive talk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental differences in the effects of repeated interviews and interviewer bias on young children's event memory and false reports.

The present study investigated developmental differences in the effects of repeated interviews and interviewer bias on children's memory and suggestibility. Three- and 5-year-olds were singly or repeatedly interviewed about a play event by a highly biased or control interviewer. Children interviewed once by the biased interviewer after a long delay made the most errors. Children interviewed repeatedly, regardless of interviewer bias, were more accurate and less likely to falsely claim that they played with a man. In free recall, among children questioned once after a long delay by the biased interviewer, 5-year-olds were more likely than were 3-year-olds to claim falsely that they played with a man. However, in response to direct questions, 3-year-olds were more easily manipulated into implying that they played with him. Findings suggest that interviewer bias is particularly problematic when children's memory has weakened. In contrast, repeated interviews that occur a short time after a to-be-remembered event do not necessarily increase children's errors, even when interviews include misleading questions and interviewer bias. Implications for developmental differences in memory and suggestibility are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Source Recall Enhances Children's Discrimination of Seen and Heard Events.

The effects of rehearsing actions by source (slideshow vs. story) and of test modality (picture vs. verbal) on source monitoring were examined. Seven- to 8-year-old children (N = 30) saw a slideshow event and heard a story about a similar event. One to 2 days later, they recalled the events by source (source recall), recalled the events without reference to source (no-source-cue recall), or engaged in no recall. Seven to 8 days later, all children received verbal and picture source-monitoring tests. Children in the source recall group were less likely than children in the other groups to claim they saw actions merely heard in the story. No-source-cue recall impaired source identification of story actions. The picture test enhanced recognition, but not source monitoring, of slide actions. Increasing the distinctiveness of the target events (Experiment 2) allowed the picture test to facilitate slideshow action discrimination by children in the no-recall group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Supportive or suggestive: Do human figure drawings help 5- to 7-year-old children to report touch?

The authors examined the accuracy of information elicited from seventy-nine 5- to 7-year-old children about a staged event that included physical contact-touching. Four to six weeks later, children's recall for the event was assessed using an interview protocol analogous to those used in forensic investigations with children. Following the verbal interview, children were asked about touch when provided with human figure drawings (drawings only), following practice using the human figure drawings (drawings with instruction), or without drawings (verbal questions only). In this touch-inquiry phase of the interview, most children provided new information. Children in the drawings conditions reported more incorrect information than those in the verbal questions condition. Forensically relevant errors were infrequent and were rarely elaborated on. Although asking children to talk about innocuous touch may lead them to report unreliable information, especially when human figure drawings are used as aids, errors are reduced when open-ended prompts are used to elicit further information about reported touches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's emerging ability to make false statements.

This study examined the origins of children's ability to make consciously false statements, a necessary component of lying. Children 2 to 5 years of age were rewarded for claiming that they saw a picture of a bird when viewing pictures of fish. They were asked outcome questions (“Do you win/lose?”), recognition questions (“Do you have a bird/fish?”), and recall questions (“What do you have?”), which were hypothesized to vary in difficulty depending on the need for consciousness of falsity (less for outcome questions) and self-generation of an appropriate response (more for recall questions). The youngest children (2? to 3? years old) were above chance on outcome questions, but it was not until age 3? that children performed above chance on recognition questions or were capable of maintaining false claims across question types. Findings have implications for understanding the emergence of deception in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of Recall in 2- to 4-Year-Old Children.

Three studies were carried out to examine early development or recall. Children between 2 years and 9 months and 5 years of age were tested on nine-item lists containing three objects from each of three conceptual categories or nine objects from nine different conceptual categories. Recall was poor, although age differences were observed. There was no evidence of active or deliberate strategy use in either age group, No overt rehearsal was observed, parallel serial position curves indicating a lack of primacy effects were obtained, and there were similar low levels of clustering over the age range studied. There was evidence of semantic category effects on recall of both age groups. All children recalled more items from categorically related than unrelated lists, responded more rapidly when reporting adjacent pairs of related than unrelated items, produced above-chance-level category clustering, and profited from categorical blocking at presentation and categorical cuing at retrieval. Reliable Age × List Type interactions indicated that the presence of category relations was more facilitating to older than younger children. The results were discussed in terms of a nondeliberate, but categorical, nature of very young children's memory, and it was suggested that early improvements in recall may be related to growth in semantic category knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of conflicting mental representation predicts suggestibility.

This study examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations (CMRs). Three- to 5-yr-olds listened to a story accompanied by pictures. Following a 4-min delay, children answered straightforward and misleading questions about the story. One wk later, their memory for the story was assessed. Children also completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about CMRs. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that suggestibility was negatively related to performance on CMR tasks. This finding remained significant after controlling for age, children's level of initial encoding of the event, and their ability to retrieve event details when not misled. An integration is proposed between children's theory of mind and source monitoring that may help to explain early developmental changes in suggestibility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Source-monitoring training facilitates preschoolers' eyewitness memory performance.

Preschool children are more susceptible to misleading postevent information than are older children and adults. One reason for young children's suggestibility is their failure to monitor the source of their memories, as in, for example, discriminating whether an event was seen live versus on television. The authors investigated whether source-monitoring training would decrease preschoolers' suggestibility. Thirty-six 3-4-year-olds observed target live and video events and were then given source-monitoring or recognition (control) training on nontarget events. Following training, all children answered 24 misleading and nonmisleading target-event questions. Children given source-monitoring training were more accurate than control group children in response to misleading and nonmisleading yes-no questions and in response to nonmisleading, open-ended questions. Implications for strategy development, dual representation, and child witness interviewing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's memory for medical emergencies: 2 years later.

Long term recall of medical emergencies (including both injury and hospital treatment) by 2- to 13-year olds was assessed 2 yrs after injury. Event identity was important: Children recalled injury details better than hospital treatment. Ninety-six children were interviewed 3 times prior to the 2-year recall; amount recalled decreased only for hospital treatment details, although accuracy of recall decreased for both injury and treatment. Twenty-one children were interviewed only twice prior to the 2-year interview. An extra interview 1 year after their injury had little effect on how much older children recalled about injury details, but it helped younger children recall the less memorable hospital event. The extra interview also helped all children maintain accuracy when recalling hospital details, but was unnecessary for the more memorable injury event. Implications for children's testimony are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mothers' scaffolding of children's problem solving: Establishing a foundation of academic self-regulatory competence.

The study examined relations between dimensions of mothers' scaffolding and children's academic self-regulatory behaviors in school. Mothers and their preschool children (68 dyads) were visited in their homes the summer before the child entered kindergarten. Mothers' metacognitive content and manner of instruction, emotional support, and transfer of responsibility were coded as mothers provided assistance to their children during 4 problem-solving tasks. Children's self-regulatory behaviors were assessed the following school year. Metacognitive content and manner of instruction were predictors of child behaviors related to cognitive awareness and management: metacognitive talk, monitoring, and help seeking. Emotional support and transfer of responsibility were related to children's task persistence and behavior control in school. Mothers' scaffolding appears to lay the foundation for children's subsequent academic self-regulatory competence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)