Cognitive and Social Determinants of Children's Memory

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目关注的是在关于过去的日常对话过程中，儿童自传体记忆扭曲的社会和认知机制。对记忆的研究表明，暗示性访谈会严重降低儿童的准确性。针对这些调查结果，研究人员制定了法医访谈指南，以尽量减少因不适当询问年轻证人而造成的错误。然而，非暗示性技巧的使用可能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可能会导致儿童错误地回忆起他们只从他人那里听说过的事件。在很大程度上尚未探索的是限制会话互动的潜在负面影响的因素以及这些影响背后的机制。目前的建议试图填补这些空白，借鉴发展文献中的记忆，消化能力，和社会影响。一系列的程序性研究被提出来：a）将儿童在接触谣言后的自然对话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约束谣言对记忆的影响; c）调查无意中听到的谣言对记忆的影响是否会随着与他人对话互动的机会而变化; d）评估儿童对传闻事件的错误报告是真实记忆错误与需求特征的函数的条件;以及e）探索与父母的自然互动是否会导致儿童对他们的经历的报告中的错误，这些错误与父母关于可能或必须发生在他们孩子身上的事情的信念一致。这项拟议中的研究将通过采访3至6岁的儿童来解决这些问题，这些儿童、他们的同学或他们的父母都曾接触过虚假谣言。除了有助于基本了解的方式，儿童的记忆可以在与他人的自然互动过程中转化，这些研究结果应该有影响的理解因素以外的采访背景下，可以影响儿童的法律的证词的准确性，并制定程序，以尽量减少报告错误的法医环境。

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.