Cognitive and Social Determinants of Children's Memory

描述(由申请者提供)：本项目涉及儿童在日常对话中有关过去的自传性记忆扭曲所涉及的社会和认知机制。对记忆的研究表明，提示性采访会严重降低儿童的准确性。针对这些发现，研究人员制定了法医面谈指南，以最大限度地减少因不适当询问年轻证人而造成的错误。然而，非暗示技巧的使用并不能消除对准确性的所有担忧，因为建议的来源可能来自正式面试环境之外。越来越多的证据表明，与他人自然发生的对话会导致儿童错误地回忆起他们只从别人那里听说的实际目击事件。制约对话互动潜在负面影响的因素，以及这些影响背后的机制，在很大程度上仍未被探索。本研究试图通过借鉴记忆力、暗示性和社会影响力方面的发展性文献来填补这些空白。提出了一系列程序性研究，旨在a)将儿童在接触谣言后自然对话的内容与他们后来的记忆报告直接联系起来；b)确定年龄和延迟时间等因素如何限制谣言对记忆的影响；c)调查无意中听到的谣言对记忆的影响是否可能随着与他人对话互动的机会而变化；d)评估儿童对谣言事件的虚假报告是真实记忆错误与需求特征的函数的条件；和e)探讨与父母的自然互动是否会导致儿童对其经历的报告出现错误，这与父母关于子女可能或必须发生的事情的看法一致。这项拟议的研究将通过采访3至6岁的儿童，了解他们、他们的同学或他们的父母接触到虚假谣言的个人经历，从而解决这些问题。除了有助于对儿童在与他人的自然互动中如何改变记忆的基本理解之外，这些研究结果还应有助于理解面谈环境之外可能影响儿童法律证词准确性的因素，并有助于制定程序以尽量减少法医环境中的报告错误。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project is concerned with the social and cognitive mechanisms involved in the distortion of children's autobiographical memories during the course of everyday conversations about the past. Research on memory demonstrates that suggestive interviews can produce serious degradations in children's accuracy. In response to these findings, researchers have developed forensic interviewing guidelines to minimize errors resulting from inappropriate questioning of young witnesses. The use of nonsuggestive techniques, however, may not eliminate all concerns about accuracy because the source of suggestions may emanate outside of the formal interview context. Growing evidence demonstrates that naturally occurring conversations with others can lead children to erroneously recall actually witnessing events that they have only heard about from others. What remain largely unexplored are the factors that constrain the potentially negative influence of conversational interactions and the mechanisms that underlie these effects. The present proposal attempts to fill these gaps by drawing on the developmental literatures in memory, suggestibility, and social influence. A series of programmatic studies are proposed to a) directly relate the content of children's natural conversations following exposure to a rumor to their later memory reports; b) determine how factors such as age and delay period may bound the effects of rumors on memory; c) investigate whether the potency of overheard rumors on memory may vary as a function of opportunities for conversational interactions with others; d) assess the conditions under which children's false reports of rumored events are a function genuine memory errors versus demand characteristics; and e) explore whether natural interactions with parents can lead to errors in children's reports of their experiences that are in line with parents' beliefs about what might or must have happened to their children. The proposed research will address these issues by interviewing 3- to 6-year-old children about personally experienced events about which they, their classmates, or their parents have been exposed to false rumors. In addition to contributing to a basic understanding of the ways in which children's memories can be transformed during natural interactions with others, these findings should have implications for understanding factors outside of the interview context that can influence the accuracy of children's legal testimony and for developing procedures to minimize reporting errors in forensic contexts.