Context and cue cards in young children's testimony: a comparison of brief narrative elaboration and context reinstatement

In a comparison of interview procedures that aimed to assist retrieval strategies in children's event recall, 72 children aged 4-6 years were questioned about a witnessed event. Context reinstatement and brief narrative elaboration (an abbreviated version of K. J. Saywitz and L. Snyder's [1996] procedure) produced similar levels of correct recall, and both elicited more correct recall than did a control condition, with no increase in errors. Combining these procedures did not further improve performance. The superiority of narrative elaboration over the control group was evident in free recall and did not depend on explicit prompting with cue cards. These findings suggest that incorporating brief narrative elaboration training in investigative interviews with children may, like context reinstatement, be a valuable mnemonic aid.     

Individual differences in children's event memory reports and the narrative elaboration technique

Children between 7 and 8 years old took part in a staged event at school and 1 week later were assessed using a short form of the Wechsler Intelligence scale for children (third edition) and measures of metamemory, narrative ability, and socioeconomic status. Two weeks following the event, children either received narrative elaboration training (NET; K.J. Saywitz & L. Snyder, 1996) and were prompted with the four NET cue cards at interview; received verbal prompts corresponding to the cue card categories, but without prior training; or were presented with the cards at interview without prior training. Children given verbal labels as prompts recalled as much information as children who received NET training and cue cards. Measures of intelligence were predictive of amount recalled for cards-only children but not for the other 2 groups, indicating that differences in recall between low- and high-IQ groups were attenuated when recall was supported by NET training or verbal prompting.     

The effect of training in categorization on free recall: Some implications for Jensen's two-level theory

The effect of training in categorization on free recall learning was investigated in order to clarify an issue relating to Jensen's two-level theory of ability, namely, whether training in categorizetion would eliminate the reported association between free recall of categorized lists and socioeconomic status (SES). The subjects were 132 children partitioned into three groups on the basis of SES and two ability tests measuring fluid and crystallized intelligence (Cattell, 1963). Half the children in each group underwent training in categorization, and half were allocated to a control condition. The results revealed an interaction between ability and training. Low SES children of high fluid intelligence benefitted from categorization training and improved substantially in free recall of a categorized list so as to equal the performance of middle SES children. In contrast, low SES children matched for crystallized intelligence but scoring low in fluid intelligence did not benefit from training. The same three groups of children also learned an uncategorized list. The results did not support Jensen's hypothesis that free recall of uncategorized lists is unrelated to intelligence and SES.     

Children's recall 1 or 2 years after an event.

In Study 1, children were reinterviewed about an event they had taken part in 2 years earlier when they were 6 years old (M.-E. Pipe & J. C. Wilson, 1994). In Study 2, children were reinterviewed about an event in which they had participated 1 year earlier when they were 6 or 9 years of age (S. Gee & M.-E. Pipe, 1995). Interviews were conducted with or without cue items and distractors, as in the original studies. The amount of information reported in free recall decreased over the 1- or 2-year delays, and for 6-year-olds, there was also a small decrease in accuracy of free recall. Reinstating specific cue items in Study 2 maintained recall when attention was drawn to them, but prompting children led to a decrease in accuracy. Whereas information repeated across interviews was highly accurate, information reported for the first time at the long delays was not.     

Children's suggestibility for an instance of a repeated event versus a unique event: the effect of degree of association between variable details

Are children who experience an event repeatedly more suggestible about an instance of the event than children who experience it once? Researchers have answered this question both in the affirmative and in the negative. In this study, we hypothesized that the degree of association between details that changed across instantiations of the event would help to explain the discrepancy. Preschoolers (4- and 5-year-olds) and first graders (6- and 7-year-olds) participated in either a single play session or four repeated play sessions, each of which contained 16 critical details. Across play sessions in the repeat-event condition, half of the critical details were associated and half were not associated. During a biasing interview 2 weeks later, children were misinformed about half of the critical details. The next day, children answered free and cued recall questions about the target play session. Among older children, repeat-event participants were more suggestible than single-event participants, especially for high-association details. Among younger children, repeat-event participants were more suggestible than single-event participants for low-association details. Consistent with some current theories of children's memory, older children were more suggestible than younger children.     

Divided attention facilitates intentional forgetting: evidence from item-method directed forgetting

This study examined the effects of post-cue interval and cognitive load on item-method directed forgetting. The results of Experiment 1 (free recall test) and Experiment 2 (cued recall test) showed that forget item retention increased as the post-cue interval increased. Moreover, increasing the cognitive load of participants by asking them to perform a secondary counting task did not impair, but rather facilitated, the intentional forgetting of the studied item under long post-cue interval conditions. These results and analyses of recall gains from the additional use of the independent cue suggest that the improved recall of forget items caused by an increase in the post-cue interval came from an automatic process, and that after receiving the forget cue, participants did not engage a suppression operation that was resource-demanded. The current findings suggest that forgetting is more effective when participants perform a secondary task after receiving the forget cue.     

Differences and similarities in event recall and suggestibility between children and adults in Germany and the United States

Children (5-6 year olds, 7-8 year olds, 9-10 year olds) and adults from Germany and the United States were shown a brief video of a theft. One week later, participants were asked to give a free narrative of an observed event (free recall), followed either by sets of misleading or unbiased questions, and finally they were given a three-choice recognition question for each queried item. German participants of all ages had higher levels of correct free recall than did American participants. American adults and 9-10 year olds gave more correct responses to the open-ended unbiased questions than did their German counterparts. Germans of all ages made more correct responses to the misleading questions, whereas national differences, favoring the Germans, for incorrect response to misleading questions were restricted to the 5-6 year olds. National differences were interpreted as reflecting possible differences in strategic abilities, exposure to formal instruction, and the degree to which children experience self-directed, autonomous learning opportunities.     

Children's memory distortions following social contact with a co-witness: Disentangling social and cognitive mechanisms

This study examined whether recalling an event with a co-witness influences children's recall. Individual 3-5-year-olds (n = 48) watched a film with a co-witness. Unbeknown to participants, the co-witness was watching an alternative version of the film. Afterwards both the co-witness and the participant answered questions about the film together (public recall), and the degree to which children conformed to the co-witness's alternative version of events was measured. Subsequently participants were questioned again individually (private recall). Children also completed false belief and inhibitory control tasks. By separating errors made in public and private, the results indicated that both social conformity (32% of errors) and memory distortion (68% of errors) played a role in co-witness influence. Inhibitory control predicted the likelihood of retracting errors in private, but only for children who failed (r=.66) rather than passed false belief tasks (r=-.10). The results suggest that children with a theory of mind conform in the company of the co-witness to avoid social embarrassment, while those a poor theory of mind conform on the basis of an inability to inhibit the co-witness's response. The findings contribute to our understanding of the motivations responsible for co-witness conformity across early childhood.     

Anxiety and Mood-congruent Autobiographical Memory: A Conceptual Failure to Replicate

This study further explored whether highly anxious participants exhibit a mood-congruent autobiographical memory bias, as was found in two previous studies (Burke & Mathews, 1992; Richards & Whittaker, 1990). The 74 high and low trait anxious participants retrieved personal memories to anxiety-related, neutral, and positive cue words, and were then asked to recall the original cue words. The study also explored how expression of emotional versus factual responses might affect a memory bias. On most dependent measures, no differences were found between anxiety groups. However, low anxious participants recalled more memories overall than high anxious participants. In addition, the emotions groups recalled more words at free recall than the facts groups. Findings fail to support previous studies that found an autobiographical memory bias to be associated with high anxiety, and cast more support for the mounting evidence against a mood-congruent memory bias in anxiety.     

Narrative Skills,Gender, Culture,and Children’s Long-Term Memory Accuracy of a Staged Event

This study examined the extent to which school-aged children’s general narrative skills provide cognitive benefits for accurate remembering or enable good storytelling that undermines memory accuracy. European American and Chinese American 6-year-old boys and girls (N = 114) experienced a staged event in the laboratory and were asked to tell a story from a picture book that accessed their narrative skill. Children were interviewed about the staged event 6 months later to assess memory accuracy. Greater narrative skill when storytelling was associated with decreased free recall and recognition memory accuracy for the staged event. In free recall responses, this effect was driven by an increase in the likelihood that inaccurate details would be included in responses from children with better general narrative skills. For girls only, narrative skill predicted poorer recognition accuracy. Girls were also more language-proficient and provided more correct details in free recall than did boys. Chinese American children were more accurate than European American children when responding to recall prompts due to less frequent provision of incorrect details, particularly in girls. Findings are discussed in light of the roles of socialization in memory-reporting accuracy.     

Stimulus array and recall method as variables in audio-visual split-span memory

Performance on an audio-visual split-span task was found to be adversely affected by the concurrent operation of two factors, namely: alternation of stimulus classes between the two input messages, and the use of a recall method which entails alternate sampling of the two messages. However, these factors had no significant effect when operating singly. The present study indicated that subjects prefer the strategy of reporting visual items first when using modality recall, and that this strategy is more efficient than that of reporting auditory items first. Also, modality recall proved to be the preferred method under free recall instructions. While there were more visual errors than auditory errors, visual commissions exceeded order errors, but auditory order errors exceeded commissions. The redundancy proposal of the search hypothesis (Yntema and Trask, 1963) was tested, and was found to be inadequate as an account of audio-visual performance.     

Thinking about memories for everyday and shocking events: Do people use ease-of-retrieval cues in memory judgments?

Extant research shows that people use retrieval ease, a feeling-based cue, to judge how well they remember life periods. Extending this approach, we investigated the role of retrieval ease in memory judgments for single events. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to recall many memories of an everyday event (New Year's Eve) rated retrieval as more difficult and judged their memory as worse than did participants asked to recall only a few memories. In Experiment 2, this ease-of-retrieval effect was found to interact with the shocking character of the remembered event: There was no effect when the event was highly shocking (i.e., learning about the attacks of September 11, 2001), whereas an effect was found when the event was experienced as less shocking (due either to increased distance to "9/11" or to the nonshocking nature of the event itself). Memory vividness accounted for additional variance in memory judgments, indicating an independent contribution of content-based cues in judgments of event memories.     

Feature bindings endure without attention: Evidence from an explicit recall task

Are integrated objects the unit of capacity of visual working memory, or is continued attention needed to maintain bindings between independently stored features? In a delayed recall task, participants reported the color and shape of a probed item from a memory array. During the delay, attention was manipulated with an exogenous cue. Recall was elevated at validly cued positions, indicating that the cue affected item memory. On invalid trials, participants most frequently recalled either both features (perfect object memory) or neither of the two features (no object memory); the frequency with which only one feature was recalled was significantly lower than predicted by feature independence as determined in a single-feature recall task. These data do not support the view that features are remembered independently when attention is withdrawn. Instead, integrated objects are stored in visual working memory without need for continued attention.     

A comparison of preschoolers' recall of experienced versus non‐experienced events across multiple interviews

Preschool children's recall of both experienced and non‐experienced activities was examined across three interviews. One hundred and six children aged 4 to 5 years (58 males, 48 females) from both low and high socioeconomic status areas participated in an event called the Deakin Activities, which consisted of two experienced activities. One or two days later, the children were asked to recall what happened in the two activities and an activity they had not experienced which was suggested to have occurred along with the experienced activities. Next, children were given false suggestions about one of the experienced (true‐biased) activities and the non‐experienced (false) activity. For the remaining experienced (true‐unbiased) activity, no questions were asked. Three and eight days after the activities were presented, children were again required to recall all three activities in their own words while a variety of suggestive techniques were used as encouragers. The results revealed that irrespective of the SES group, assent rates across the true and false activities became more similar after the first interview. Furthermore, children's narratives about the false activity became more similar in detail, structure and quality to their narratives about the true activities across interviews. However, the rate of fantastic/improbable details was higher for the false activity compared to the true activities, children reported more interviewer suggestions about the false activity than the true‐biased activity, and there were fewer confabulation errors reported about the false activity compared to the true activities. The implications of the results are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding the dynamics of correct and error responses in free recall: Evidence from externalized free recall

The dynamics of correct and error responses in a variant of delayed free recall were examined in the present study. In the externalized free recall paradigm, participants were presented with lists of words and were instructed to subsequently recall not only the words that they could remember from the most recently presented list, but also any other words that came to mind during the recall period. Externalized free recall is useful for elucidating both sampling and postretrieval editing processes, thereby yielding more accurate estimates of the total number of error responses, which are typically sampled and subsequently edited during free recall. The results indicated that the participants generally sampled correct items early in the recall period and then transitioned to sampling more erroneous responses. Furthermore, the participants generally terminated their search after sampling too many errors. An examination of editing processes suggested that the participants were quite good at identifying errors, but this varied systematically on the basis of a number of factors. The results from the present study are framed in terms of generate-edit models of free recall.     

The effect of postevent information on adults' eyewitness reports

The present experiment examined the conditions under which adults' reports of an event are influenced by information encountered after the event occurred. Adults were exposed to neutral, leading, and misleading postevent information about a target event 24 hours after that event. Twenty‐four hours after exposure to postevent information, participants were first asked a general, open‐ended question (free recall test procedure) and were then asked a series of specific questions. Some participants were asked to select their response from two possible alternatives (recognition test procedure) and some participants were required to generate their own answers to the same questions (directed recall test procedure). The nature of the original information, the nature of the postevent information, and the specificity of the questioning procedure influenced the number of correct responses and the number of misleading errors that participants made. These findings have important implications for interviewing adult witnesses. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children as Earwitnesses: Memory for Emotional Auditory Events

We examined the influence of age and emotionality of auditory stimuli on long‐term memory for environmental sound events. Sixty children aged 7–11 years were presented with two environmental sound events: an emotional car crash and a neutral event, someone brushing their teeth. The sound events comprised six individual environmental sounds, and the participants passively listened to the sound events through a headset. After a two‐week delay, participants performed a cued recall task and a recognition task. Independent of age, children were notably poor at recalling the sound events. Children recalled and recognized significantly more sounds from the emotional sound event than the neutral sound event. Additionally, the older children performed the recall task better than the younger children. The present findings confirm and expand the previously reported superiority of emotional material in memory.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The irrelevant sound phenomenon revisited: what role for working memory capacity?

High-span individuals (as measured by the operation span [OSPAN] technique) are less likely than low-span individuals to notice their own names in an unattended auditory stream (A. R. A. Conway, N. Cowan, & M. F. Bunting, 2001). The possibility that OSPAN accounts for individual differences in auditory distraction on an immediate recall test was examined. There was no evidence that high-OSPAN participants were more resistant to the disruption caused by irrelevant speech in serial or in free recall. Low-OSPAN participants did, however, make more semantically related intrusion errors from the irrelevant sound stream in a free recall test (Experiment 4). Results suggest that OSPAN mediates semantic components of auditory distraction dissociable from other aspects of the irrelevant sound effect.