Preschool-aged children (3- to 6-year-olds) are more likely than older children and adults to confuse the sources, or origins, of events. For example, young children tend to confuse events merely heard about or seen on television with their memories of what really happened. Discriminating between, or """"""""monitoring,"""""""" the sources of information (e.g., heard versus real-life events) is particularly important in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse. When reporting alleged abuse, child witnesses must report what really happened to them and must not let information from other sources (e.g., events discussed with other people, events seen on TV) intrude into their accounts. In order to inoculate children against making sourcemonitoring errors, the first aim of the proposed study is to examine whether training 3- to 6-year-old children to discriminate real-life events from events only heard about will enhance their memory accuracy.
A second aim of the proposed study is to examine whether source-monitoring training on one set of events (real life and TV) will generalize to another set of events (real life and heard). If training generalizes, this finding would suggest a useful approach for incorporating source-monitoring training into investigative interviews with young children. After seeing a real-life event and hearing about another similar event from a story (target events), the children will receive source-monitoring or recognition (control) training on nontarget events. Within each training condition, half of the children will receive training on a set of events that are analogous to the sources of the target events (real life and heard) and half of the children will receive training on a nonanalogous set of events (real life and TV). Training on the nonanalogous events will be used to examine the generalizability of source-monitoring training. Following training, all children will answer a set of misleading and nonmisleading target-event questions to test transfer of training. ? ? ?
