D. Stephen Lindsay, Ph.D. - US grants

9409231 POOLE This project will use a powerful new suggestibility manipulation to examine several important issues concerning the strengths and weaknesses of children as witnesses. The technique, an analog of parental involvement in false allegations of abuse, is fully piloted and involves no deception. In Phase 1, children between the ages of 3 and 8 years will participate in a series of events and will be interviewed to determine what they can report about those events. Three months later, parents will read the children a story that includes descriptions of events the children had experienced and events they had not experienced. The children will then be reinterviewed on two occasions with a stepwise procedure in which nonsuggestive questions are followed by leading questions and a series of questions that specifically ask the children to distinguish between events they experienced and events they only heard described. Because the interview procedures yield information about individual differences in recall, forgetting, acquiescence (i.e., saying "yes" to a suggestion), and source monitoring (i.e., distinguishing between memories from several sources), these data will be a first step in constructing a systematic theory of the factors responsible for developmental changes in suggestibility. This project will accomplish the following goals: (a) trace developmental trends in susceptibility to false information provided by parents; (b) evaluate the types of false reports that are elicited by interview procedures with varying degrees of prompting; (c) evaluate developmental changes in recall, acquiescence, and memory source monitoring; and (d) test the adequacy of various causal models that specify the contributions of these processes to children's suggestibility. The resulting data will have important implications for how investigations of child abuse allegations are conducted, and will contribute to the development of interview procedures that more adequat ely test alternative hypotheses about the sources of children's reports. ***

Abstract Poole 9709111 There is a pressing need to develop interviewing procedures that enhance children's ability to discriminate, in their eyewitness reports, between events they remember experiencing versus events they remember hearing other people describe. This research builds on earlier work by these investigators that demonstrated that misinformation from parents often infiltrates the autobiographical reports of 3- to 8-year-old children, that errors appear even during the free-narrative portion of interviews, that asking explicit source-monitoring questions improves older children's ability to distinguish between events that actually occurred versus misinformation. The current project develops and tests interviewing techniques designed to help young witnesses escape the contaminating influence of prior exposure to misleading suggestions. In the first phase 1160 children play individually with an unfamiliar man (Mr. Science) and subsequently participate in an interview about the Mr. Science experience. Three months later, parents read a story to their children and the children are interviewed in three conditions: source-monitoring training (SMT) before or after the interview or no training control. Data analyses assess the efficacy of SMT for reducing false reports in free-narrative response without reducing accurate reports, the effects of SMT on accuracy of answers to leading questions, developmental trends in performance during SMT and the interview, and relations between individual difference variables and accuracy of testimony. This research answers basic questions about children's suggestibility and source-monitoring ability and practical issues of significance for forensic interviewing. %%% There is a pressing need to develop interviewing procedures that enhance children's ability to discriminate, in their eyewitness reports, between events they remember experiencing versus events they remember hearing other people describe. This research builds on earlier work by these investigators that demonstrated that misinformation from parents often infiltrates the autobiographical reports of 3- to 8-year-old children, that errors appear even during the free-narrative portion of interviews, that asking explicit source-monitoring questions improves older children's ability to distinguish between events that actually occurred versus misinformation. The current project develops and tests interviewing techniques designed to help young witnesses escape the contaminating influence of prior exposure to misleading suggestions. In the first phase 1160 children play individually with an unfamiliar man (Mr. Science) and subsequently participate in an interview about the Mr. Science experience. Three months later, parents read a story to their children and the children are interviewed in three conditions: source-monitoring training (SMT) before or after the interview or no training control. Data analyses assess the efficacy of SMT for reducing false reports in free-narrative response without reducing accurate reports, the effects of SMT on accuracy of answers to leading questions, developmental trends in performance during SMT and the interview, and relations between individual difference variables and accuracy of testimony. This research answers basic questions about children's suggestibility and source-monitoring ability and practical issues of significance for forensic interviewing. ***