Theory-of-mind development influences suggestibility and source monitoring.

According to the mental-state reasoning model of suggestibility, 2 components of theory of mind mediate reductions in suggestibility across the preschool years. The authors examined whether theory-of-mind performance may be legitimately separated into 2 components and explored the memory processes underlying the associations between theory of mind and suggestibility, independent of verbal ability. Children 3 to 6 years old completed 6 theory-of-mind tasks and a postevent misinformation procedure. Contrary to the model's prediction, a single latent theory-of-mind factor emerged, suggesting a single-component rather than a dual-component conceptualization of theory-of-mind performance. This factor provided statistical justification for computing a single composite theory-of-mind score. Improvements in theory of mind predicted reductions in suggestibility, independent of verbal ability (Study 1, n = 72). Furthermore, once attribution biases were controlled (Study 2, n = 45), there was also a positive relationship between theory of mind and source memory, but not recognition performance. The findings suggest a substantial, and possibly causal, association between theory-of-mind development and resistance to suggestion, driven specifically by improvements in source monitoring. (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)     

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)     

Confidence judgments in children's and adult's event recall and suggestibility.

The present work investigated the role of children's and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes for unbiased event recall tasks and for suggestibility. Three studies were conducted in which children and adults indicated their degree of confidence that their answers were correct after (Study 1) and before (Study 2) answering either unbiased or misleading questions or (Study 3) forced-choice recognition questions. There was a strong tendency for overestimation of confidence regardless of age and question format. However, children did not lack the principal metacognitive competencies when these questions were asked in a neutral interview. Under misleading questioning, in contrast, children's monitoring skills were seriously impaired. Within each age group, better metacognitive differentiation was positively associated with recall accuracy in the suggestive interview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Suggestibility of children's memory: Psycholegal implications.

Examined the psychological mechanisms responsible for suggestibility in the accounts of young children in 4 experiments. Exp I examined whether 182 children (aged 3–12 yrs) were susceptible to misleading postevent information. Results indicate that young children (3- and 4-yr olds) are particularly vulnerable to suggestion. The subsequent experiments focused on this age range and the basis for their susceptibility to misleading postevent information. Exp II, with 102 Ss (mean age 4.6 yrs) found that Ss' susceptibility to misleading information was reduced when another child, as opposed to an adult, provided the misleading information. Therefore, suggestibility effects in children arise in part from a desire to conform to the wishes of an adult authority figure. Exps III and IV tested 2 competing hypotheses as to how postevent suggestions distort children's memories using a total of 175 preschoolers. Data indicate that postevent suggestions can in fact distort memory. Results from these 4 experiments are discussed within the context of children's eyewitness memory and the associated psycholegal implications. (66 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Treating another's actions as one's own: Children's memory of and learning from joint activity.

Children often overestimate their contribution to collaborative activities. Across 2 studies, the authors investigated whether this memory bias supports internalization of the actions of others in the context of joint exchanges. After taking turns with (high collaborative condition; Studies 1 and 2) or working independently of (low collaborative condition; Study 2) an adult experimenter to create a series of novel toys, children's agent memory and reconstruction ability were assessed. Children in the high collaborative condition but not the low collaborative condition systematically overclaimed the actions of their social partner, more frequently reporting having completed steps performed by the experimenter than vice versa. This "I did it" bias was related to learning performance: high collaborative children outperformed low collaborative children both during an immediate reconstruction task and 4 months later, and the strength of the bias predicted children's independent toy-building accuracy. It is argued that the "I did it" bias may emerge as part of a general process of learning from others and is supported by a common framework for representing self-actions and other actions. (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)     

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)     

Recollection rejection: How children edit their false memories.

A new methodology is presented for studying children's ability to suppress memory reports of false-but-gist-consistent events, one that measures children's use of a specific editing operation (recollection rejection) that suppresses false reports by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Children make memory reports under 2 instructional conditions, verbatim and gist, and the data are analyzed with fuzzy-trace theory's conjoint-recognition model. Application of the new methodology in studies of children's false memory for narrative events revealed that (a) false-memory editing increases dramatically between early and middle childhood, (b) even young children spontaneously edit their false memories, (c) measures of children's false-memory editing react appropriately to experimental manipulations, and (d) developmental reductions in the incidence of false-memory reports are primarily due to developmental improvements in verbatim memory ability (rather than to decreases in the formation of false memories). Implications for child forensic interviewing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional reminiscing and the development of an autobiographical self.

According to autobiographical memory theorists, past event conversations provide children with a framework for evaluating and connecting past events into a coherent autobiography (R. Fivush, 1994; K. Nelson, 1993; M. K. Welch-Ross, 1995). Two studies were conducted to empirically examine the association between past event conversation style and an independent measure of children's self-concept consistency. In Study 1, 50 New Zealand mothers discussed everyday past events with their children at 51 and 65 months of age. In Study 2, 51 New Zealand parents discussed 1 positive and 3 negative past events with their 5- and 6-year-old children. The consistency of children's self-views was assessed in both studies using the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (R. Eder, 1990). Children's self-concept consistency was moderately associated with greater explanation of the causes and consequences of children's negative emotions, resolution through social contact, and evaluation of positive events but not with simple attributions of emotion. These findings implicate parent-child conversations as a medium through which children can begin to understand the personal meaning of past experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition: Effects of lexical familiarity, semantic content, encoding instructions, and retention interval.

Fuzzy-trace theory is used to explore children's memory and comprehension of sentences describing spatial or linear relationships. Recognition tests were given immediately and after a 1 wk delay, and test sentence truth, wording (original and novel), and premise–inference status were varied. When children were instructed to recognize only verbatim sentences (Exp 1), premise recognition (memory) was independent of systematic misrecognition of true inferences (reasoning), and experimental manipulations (delay; spatial vs linear stimuli) drove memory and reasoning in opposite directions. Therefore, verbatim memories were not semantically integrated with gist, such as inferences. When children were specifically instructed to process gist (Exp 2), however, memory and reasoning were positively dependent. Results are discussed from the perspectives of constructivism, theories of suggestibility, and fuzzy-trace theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trauma, memory, and suggestibility in children

In this review we examine factors hypothesized to affect children's memory for traumatic events. Theoretical ideas on the processing and remembering of trauma are presented and critiqued. We review research on how psychopathology may generally influence and dissociation and posttraumatic stress disorder may specifically influence children's memory and suggestibility. The special case of child maltreatment is addressed as it relates to interviewing children about traumatic life experiences. Throughout we draw on current developmental, cognitive, social, and clinical theory and research. The review covers a controversial and exciting area of psychological inquiry.     

Sources of developmental change in children's word-problem performance.

This study was designed to examine the roles of domain-specific and general information-processing skills in developmental change in children's performance on arithmetic word problems. In 2 studies, arithmetic knowledge, processing time, memory, reading skill, and word-problem performance were measured in 8- to 12-year-olds (N?=?120 in Study 1 and N?=?155 in Study 2). Word-problem performance was predicted by arithmetic knowledge (times and errors in solving simple addition and subtraction problems) and by general information-processing skills (reading and processing time and, to a lesser extent and less consistently, memory). Results are discussed in relation to the factors that contribute to word-problem skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imaginative suggestibility and hypnotizability: An empirical analysis.

Hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestibility were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, nonhypnotic suggestibility was suppressed when measured after hypnotic suggestibility, whereas hypnotic suggestibility was not affected by the order of assessment. Experiment 2 confirmed a small but significant effect of hypnosis on suggestibility when nonhypnotic suggestibility was measured first. Nonhypnotic suggestibility was correlated with absorption, fantasy proneness, motivation, and response expectancy, but only expectancy predicted suggestibility when the other variables were controlled. Behavioral response to hypnosis was predicted by nonhypnotic suggestibility, motivation, and expectancy in a model accounting for 53% of the variance. Experiential response to hypnotic suggestion was predicted only by nonhypnotic suggestibility. Unexpectedly, hypnosis was found to decrease suggestibility for a substantial minority of participants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's awareness of the origins of their mental representations.

A series of studies addressed preschool-age children's ability to identify and remember the epistemic and imaginal origins of their mental representations. Study 1 revealed that children as young as 3 were able to differentiate imaginal from perceptual origins. Study 2 explored children's ability to differentiate representations formed through inference from those formed through imagination and seeing. Results revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds differed significantly in their ability to identify and remember the sources of their mental representations. Identifying and remembering inference was the most difficult for all age groups. Results from Study 3 rule out the possibility that incorrect performance in Studies 1 and 2 resulted from an inability to remember the objects used in the tasks. Results from these studies indicate that children as young as 3 are able to differentiate mental representations based on fiction from those based on fact, but that this ability continues to develop throughout the preschool years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

True and false memories in children and adults: A cognitive neuroscience perspective.

The authors consider evidence concerning accuracy and distortion in children's recollections within the broader context of recent research on memory that has used the methods and conceptual framework of cognitive neuroscience. They focus on 3 phenomena (source amnesia, confabulation, and false recognition) that have been observed in young children and in adults who have sustained damage to the frontal lobes. Similarities and differences between the memory performance of young children and frontal lobe patients are noted, and evidence concerning frontal lobe maturation and cognitive development is examined. The literature provides suggestive but not conclusive support for the hypothesis that some aspects of memory development and cognitive development are associated with immature frontal functioning. The authors conclude by considering several cognitive and temperamental factors that may be related to suggestibility and memory distortion in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making children into competent witnesses: Reactions to the amicus brief In re Michaels.

In their amicus brief, M. Bruck and S. J. Ceci (see record 1996-09956-001) highlight the many ways in which children's competence and informativeness can be undercut by incompetent investigative procedures and interview techniques. In this article, the authors discuss ways in which skilled interviewers, with realistic goals regarding the amount and quality of information that can be obtained from young informants, can instead enhance the quality of children's accounts. The discussion of these issues is informed by a review of the scholarly literatures on children's memory, communicative styles and skills, and suggestibility, as well as by field research on the usefulness of different interview strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On remembering… more or less: A trace strength interpretation of developmental differences in suggestibility.

In this article we review the arguments of Brainerd and Reyna (1988) concerning children's presumed vulnerability to erroneous postevent suggestions. Contrary to most researchers in this area who view memory as an all-or-none phenomenon, these authors maintain that the observed developmental trend in suggestibility could be the result of nonsuggestibility mechanisms that operate differently for various age groups because of correlated changes in the strength of their memory trace. They elaborate a trace strength account of these findings, one with which we agree and have endorsed in our previous work. In this comment we review the various possibilities that exist for age-related differences to occur to memory traces in response to misleading postevent suggestions. We conclude by arguing that most of the suggestibility effects found by Ceci, Ross, and Toglia (1987) were probably the result of the mechanisms we postulated, even though the mechanisms described by Brainerd and Reyna may have accounted for some of them and have a great deal of merit in explaining other findings in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory loci of suggestibility development: Comment on Ceci, Ross, and Toglia (1987).

We explore three explanations of the age trends in susceptibility to leading questions that were reported by Ceci, Ross, and Toglia (1987). The first explanation, that proposed by Ceci et al., is that suggestibility effects are memorially real (i.e., leading questions actually distort target memory) and the magnitudes of such effects vary ontogenetically. The second explanation is that suggestibility effects are memorially real, but they are developmentally invariant. Apparent age changes in suggestibility are said to arise from correlated (and uncontrolled) changes in learning or forgetting rates. The third explanation is that suggestibility effects are not memorially real but, rather, are epiphenomena of certain performance advantages that are intrinsic to control conditions, such as the distractor novelty effect and the retention enhancement effect. Here, apparent age changes in suggestibility are viewed as artifacts of chronological shifts in subjects' ability to benefit from these performance advantages. (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)