The influence of imagery, timing, and individual differences on the accuracy of children's recall /

Six studies were conducted to examine the influence of various cognitive and social factors underlying children's suggestibility. In Study 1, a misinformation paradigm was used to assess if the addition of visual information to verbal reminders increases preschool children's accurate and inaccurate recall of an experienced event. The results showed that the presentation of pictorial information with verbal reminders increased children's susceptibility to misinformation; however, generation of guided visual imagery produced the same misinformation effects as simple verbal reminders. Study 2 examined the influence of guided visual imagery on kindergarten and grade 3 children's reports of an entire event. Children were interviewed three times about a true and false event. Half of the children were given guided imagery instructions the other half were asked to think about the events. The kindergartners were more susceptible to false event creation than the third-graders. Guided imagery did not increase the rate of false reporting, but the kindergartners who formed visual images of the false event included more false details in their false reports. Studies 3a and 3b examined the effects of timing and repetition of suggestive interviewing on kindergarteners' recall. The results showed that repetition of misinformation only increased suggestibility when the misinformation was temporally close to both the event and memory test. The long-term consequences of suggestive interviewing were assessed in both Studies 1 and 3a. The relative misinformation and facilitation effects were unchanged when the children were re-interviewed approximately five months after the initial memory test. Studies 4a and 4b examined the association between psychosocial and cognitive variables and interrogative suggestibility (Study 4a), susceptibility to misinformation (Study 4a), and false event creation (Study 4b). The results of Study 4a showed small but significant correlations between interr