Children's eyewitness reports after exposure to misinformation from parents.

Abstract

This study examined how misleading suggestions from parents influenced children's eyewitness reports. Children (3 to 8 years old) participated in science demonstrations, listened to their parents read a story that described experienced and nonexperienced events, and subsequently discussed the science experience in two follow-up interviews. Many children described fictitious events in response to open-ended prompts, and there were no age differences in suggestibility during this phase of the interview. Accuracy declined markedly in response to direct questions, especially for the younger children. Although the older children retracted many of their false reports after receiving source-monitoring instructions, the younger children did not. Path analyses indicated that acquiescence, free recall, and source monitoring all contribute to mediating patterns of suggestibility across age. Results indicate that judgments about the accuracy of children's testimony must consider the possibility of exposure to misinformation prior to formal interviews. During the past decade, there has been keen interest in young children's performance when interviewed about autobiographical events. This interest was sharpened by broad social changes that led the public to be more concerned about crimes to which child victims are often the sole witnesses (e.g., child sexual abuse), but it also reflected a movement in psychology away from relatively artificial research paradigms (e.g., studies of memory for word lists) and toward more naturalistic and multifaceted approaches to research. Although the field of eyewitness testimony receives considerable attention for its forensic implications, researchers increasingly view eyewitness paradigms as tools for studying basic issues in memory and cognition. There have been several recent reviews of the literature on interviewing children for forensic purposes (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Poole & Lamb, 1998), and we do not offer an exhaustive recapitulation here. In its broadest outlines, the literature can be