Inoculating child witnesses against source errors

描述（由申请人提供）：学龄前儿童（3至6岁）比年龄较大的儿童和成人更容易混淆事件的来源或起源。例如，年幼的孩子往往会混淆仅仅在电视上听到或看到的事件与他们对真实发生的事情的记忆。区分或“监测”信息来源（例如，在涉及性虐待指控的案件中特别重要。在报告指称的虐待行为时，儿童证人必须报告在他们身上发生的真实情况，不得让其他来源的信息（例如，与其他人讨论的事件，在电视上看到的事件）侵入他们的帐户。为了防止儿童发生源监测错误，本研究的第一个目的是研究训练3至6岁的儿童区分现实生活中的事件和只听说过的事件是否会提高他们的记忆准确性。拟议的研究的第二个目的是检查是否源监控一组事件（真实的生活和电视）的培训将推广到另一组事件（真实的生活和听到）。如果培训推广，这一发现将建议一个有用的方法，将源监测培训到调查采访幼儿。在看到现实生活中的事件并从故事中听到另一个类似的事件（目标事件）后，孩子们将接受对非目标事件的源监控或识别（控制）训练。在每个训练条件下，一半的儿童将接受一组与目标事件（真实的生活和听到的）来源类似的事件的训练，一半的儿童将接受一组非类似事件（真实的生活和电视）的训练。对非类似事件的培训将被用来检查源监控培训的普遍性。培训结束后，所有儿童将回答一组误导性和非误导性的目标事件问题，以测试培训的转移。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Preschool-aged children (3- to 6-year-olds) are more likely than older children and adults to confuse the sources, or origins, of events. For example, young children tend to confuse events merely heard about or seen on television with their memories of what really happened. Discriminating between, or "monitoring," the sources of information (e.g., heard versus real-life events) is particularly important in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse. When reporting alleged abuse, child witnesses must report what really happened to them and must not let information from other sources (e.g., events discussed with other people, events seen on TV) intrude into their accounts. In order to inoculate children against making sourcemonitoring errors, the first aim of the proposed study is to examine whether training 3- to 6-year-old children to discriminate real-life events from events only heard about will enhance their memory accuracy. A second aim of the proposed study is to examine whether source-monitoring training on one set of events (real life and TV) will generalize to another set of events (real life and heard). If training generalizes, this finding would suggest a useful approach for incorporating source-monitoring training into investigative interviews with young children. After seeing a real-life event and hearing about another similar event from a story (target events), the children will receive source-monitoring or recognition (control) training on nontarget events. Within each training condition, half of the children will receive training on a set of events that are analogous to the sources of the target events (real life and heard) and half of the children will receive training on a nonanalogous set of events (real life and TV). Training on the nonanalogous events will be used to examine the generalizability of source-monitoring training. Following training, all children will answer a set of misleading and nonmisleading target-event questions to test transfer of training.