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 i s 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.
| Zaragoza, M S; Koshmider 3rd, J W (1989) Misled subjects may know more than their performance implies. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 15:246-55 |
| Bowman, L L; Zaragoza, M S (1989) Similarity of encoding context does not influence resistance to memory impairment following misinformation. Am J Psychol 102:249-64 |
