Cognitive and Social Determinants of Children's Memory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.