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The effects of interacting in repeated events on children's eyewitness memory and source monitoring
Author(s) -
Roberts Kim P.,
Blades Mark
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199810)12:5<489::aid-acp535>3.0.co;2-#
Subject(s) - psychology , eyewitness testimony , eyewitness memory , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , recall
Accurate eyewitness memory of an event may be affected by exposure to and degree of involvement with other related events. In this study, we investigated whether interacting in a related video event affected children's accounts of a real‐life target event, and whether interacting in the target event affected memory for different details within the target event. Four‐, 6‐, and 9‐year‐old children interacted with an adult who made a puppet. Half of the children in each age group also interacted with a video of a similar event (interactive condition) and half sat and watched the video without interacting (watch condition). When asked non‐misleading questions a week later, children in the interactive condition confused the two events more than those in the watch condition. The 4‐year‐olds in the interactive condition reported a higher rate of confusions in free recall than the 4‐year‐olds in the watch condition. There were no effects of interaction on responses to misleading questions. The 6‐ and 9‐year‐olds were more accurate at answering questions related to actions they themselves had performed than actions performed by the experimenter, although this pattern was reversed for the 4‐year‐olds. The results are discussed in terms of children's eyewitness memory. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.