Maria S. Zaragoza - US grants

The proposed research is concerned with understanding the effects of misleading postevent information on preschool children's memory for witnessed events. The main objective of the proposed research will be to evaluate the hypothesis that misleading suggestions presented after children view an event will impair their ability to remember the witnessed event. Although studies with adults have uniformly failed to find evidence of memory impairment following misinformation, analogous studies with young children have produced contradictory results. The proposed research will attempt to resolve this discrepancy in the children's literature by systematically evaluating various factors that may contribute to the occurence of memory impairment in an attempt to isolate the factors that are responsible for memory impairment effects. The first aim is to test the hypothesis that very young preschoolers (e.g., 3 yrs. of age) are more susceptible to memory impairment following misinformation than older preschoolers (e.g., 5 yrs. of age). The second aim of the proposed project will be to systematically investigate the relationship between memory impairment and level of memory for the original information. The final aim of the proposed studies will be to test the generality of the memory impairment hypothesis by using a newly developed recall procedure rather than the recognition procedure that has been used in previous studies. A recall procedure is a more sensitive test of memory impairment and therefore offers a more stringent, as well as more ecologically valid, test of the memory impairment hypothesis. The proposed research should provide much needed information about the conditions under which misleading information impairs memory for an originally-seen event. These results will provide the necessary foundation for future attempts to understand the mechanisms underlying susceptibility to memory impairment. in addition, understanding the extent to which preschoolers are susceptible to memory impairment will have important implications for evaluating their competence to testify.

Many studies have shown that subjects exposed to misleading suggestions after witnessing an event are likely to incorporate the suggested information into their reports of the event. Although numerous studies have documented these suggestibility effects, little is known about the extent to which people come to believe they actually remember seeing the items that were merely suggested to them. Recent studies conducted in our laboratory suggest that subjects do, under some conditions, come to believe they remember seeing the suggested items they report, an error we refer to as a source misattribution error. Nevertheless, it is also clear that source misattribution is not an inevitable consequence of exposure to suggestion. The goal of the proposed work is to develop a model that will specify when source monitoring following exposure to suggestion will be accurate and when it is likely to fail. The proposed studies have three specific aims designed to achieve this objective. The first aim is to evaluate and identify the specific memory characteristics that facilitate and hinder accurate source monitoring performance. Several studies will evaluate the role of characteristics such as contextual cues, visual/spatial detail, and semantic elaboration in source monitoring performance. A second aim is to examine how source misattributions vary as a function of the number of exposures to the suggested item, the contextual variability of the repeated exposures, and the credibility of the source of the suggested information. The third aim is to extend the study of source misattributions following exposure to suggestion by (a) examining the role of conscious recollection in source misattributions, (b) exploring the effects of implied rather than explicit suggestion and (c) assessing age-related changes in the propensity toward source misattribution errors. Collectively, the results of the proposed studies should lay the empirical groundwork for the development of a theory on the role of source monitoring in suggestibility. In addition, to the extent that some forms of amnesia and age-related dementia are characterized by failures in source monitoring, the proposed work has implications for understanding memory dysfunction.

Although there is an extensive scientific literature on the suggestibility of children's eyewitness memory, the vast majority of these studies have focused on a single type of suggestive interviewing situation, namely, instances where the misleading (or false) information is explicitly provided by the interviewer. However, in many of the real-world investigative or therapeutic contexts where suggestive interviewing if of concern, the nature of the suggestive questioning is to press the child to provide details of events they do not remember or never experienced. In other words, the child is forced to fabricate events he/she never witnessed. Yet, the extent to which such forced confabulation might later compromise the integrity of children's eyewitness memory is poorly understood. This research builds on earlier work by the investigator that demonstrated that, following such interviews; children sometimes come to have false memories for the events that they had earlier knowingly confabulated. One goal of the proposed experiments is to assess the generalizability of these findings to situations that have greater forensic relevance.

Children (1st, 3rd, and 5th grade) will witness a live event involving an unfamiliar male. Shortly thereafter they will be asked a series of questions about the man's activities. Some of the questions will inquire about fictitious events that never happened, including questions that falsely implicate the man of wrongdoing (e.g., asking how he broke a videotape, when he never did so). The critical manipulation is that the children will be pressed to answer all of the questions, even if they must guess. After a retention interval, the children will be tested on their memory for the source of the answers they confabulated. The issue of primary interest is assessing the extent to which children falsely remember witnessing events they have in fact never seen, but had earlier fabricated when pressed to do so. In addition, the proposed experiments will assess the role of forensically relevant contextual factors such as interviewer feedback, repeated questioning, and reflective elaboration in children's false memory for confabulated events. Finally, one experiment will evaluate the efficacy of a theory-based intervention for minimizing children's false memory errors.

The current project addresses the following four questions: (1) What factors promote the creation of false memories for knowingly confabulated incidents, and what factors facilitate resistance to these memory error: (2) Does susceptibility to false memory for knowingly confabulated details change over the elementary school years? (3) What is the relationship between "resistance to confabulation" and true vs. false memory production? (4) How do the characteristics of self-generated confabulations influence false memory creation? The results have the potential to advance current forensic theory and practice by answering basic questions regarding children's susceptibility to false memory under circumstances that, although common in real-world forensic investigations, have yet to be investigated.