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.
