Helping children to remember: The influence of object cues on children's accounts of a real event.

Abstract

The authors examined the effects of reinstating objects from an event on 6- and 9-year-old children's reports of the event in which they had either participated or observed. Half of the 95 were interviewed twice, 10 days and 10 weeks after the event (Group 1), and the remaining were interviewed a single time, 10 weeks after (Group 2). Following free recall, prompted recall and direct questions were accompanied by objects from the event and distractors for half the children. The effect of the delay on free recall was ameliorated by the prior interview for older but not younger children. Objects attenuated age differences in prompted recall for participants and enhanced accuracy in response to questions. Objects also led to more errors at the long delay. Analyses based on signal detection theory indicated that both response strategy and memory-related factors contributed to developmental changes in compliance with misleading questions. It is now widely recognized that cannot be categorized as competent or incompetent witnesses on the basis of age alone. Many factors influence children's accounts of events, and an interactional perspective on children's eye witness testimony, according to which the skills demonstrated by the child are jointly determined by the child and the environmental context, is beginning to emerge. Such a perspective highlights the importance of the interviewer's behavior (e.g., Stellar, 1991) which, in turn, points to the need to develop innovative interviewing techniques so that children can be empowered to become their most reliable selves (McGough, 1991, p. 167). In recent studies, a number of procedures designed to improve children's event reports have been examined, including interviewer style (Goodman, Bottoms, Schwartz-Kenney, & Rudy, 1991), preparation and training prior to interviews (Saywitz & Snyder, 1993), procedures from Fisher and Geiselman's (1992) cognitive interview (Memon, Cronin, Eaves, & Bull, 1993; Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992), and the use of nonverbal props (DeLoache, Kolstad, & Anderson, 1991; Goodman & Aman, 1990; Pipe, Gee, & Wilson, 1993). In the present study we ex