Indicating when you do not know the answer: The effect of question format and interviewer knowledge on children's ‘don't know’ responses

Children are interviewed in a variety of contexts, for example, in the legal setting and in experimental research. In these situations, it is often very important that children indicate when they do not know the answer to a question, rather than guess. In the present experiment, one hundred and forty‐nine 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds witnessed a staged event in one of two conditions. The interviewer was either present at the event (knowledgeable interviewer) or absent from the event (uninformed interviewer). Children were then interviewed using yes/no questions and wh‐questions. Within each type of question, half were answerable based on the information provided; the other half were not answerable (i. e. the correct answer was ‘don't know’). The children performed consistently well with the answerable questions. With the unanswerable questions, there was an effect of format and interviewer knowledge. Children were more likely correctly to indicate that they did not know the answer to an unanswerable wh‐question than an unanswerable yes/no question. Also, children were more likely correctly to say ‘don't know’ to unanswerable questions when the interviewer had been absent from the event.     

The Effects of Accuracy Motivation on Children's and Adults' Event Recall,Suggestibility, and Their Answers to Unanswerable Questions

This study investigated children's and adults' event recall accuracy and suggestibility effects when participants' accuracy motivation was manipulated. A total of 240 participants (6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds, and adults) were shown a video and later asked 4 types of questions: answerable questions, both open-ended and strongly misleading, and unanswerable questions, both open-ended and strongly misleading. Participants were either (a) rewarded with a token for every correct answer (high accuracy motivation, Free Report Plus Incentive condition), (b) explicitly given the option of answering with "don't know" when unsure (medium accuracy motivation, Free Report condition), or (c) asked to provide an answer to every question, even when they were not sure or had to guess or both (low accuracy motivation, Forced Report condition). The condition with the high accuracy motivation yielded the highest recall accuracy scores for answerable open-ended and misleading questions. For unanswerable questions, even the youngest age group was able to increase the number of appropriate "don't know" answers when highly motivated to be accurate, but a misleading question format undermined these abilities. The results highlight important interactions between social (accuracy motivation) and cognitive factors (metacognitive monitoring processes) in children's formal interviewing.     

How to answer an unanswerable question? Factors affecting correct “don't know” responding in memory tasks

When reporting from memory, people may often be asked unanswerable questions—questions for which the correct answer has never been encoded. These unanswerable questions should be met with an “I don't know” response. Previous research has shown that a manipulation commonly used to enhance memory at retrieval—context reinstatement—reduces appropriate “do not know” responding to unanswerable questions. Here we investigated whether this reduction is due to increased belief that a given question is answerable, or solely to increased confidence in specific responses for questions already believed to be answerable. In two experiments, we show that context reinstatement reduces “do not know” responding even when a “do not remember” option is available to express beliefs that particular questions are answerable. These results indicate that improved access to contextual information at retrieval creates an erroneous belief that unanswerable questions are in fact answerable.     

The effect of question repetition within interviews on young children's eyewitness recall

This study investigated the influence of question repetition and question type (answerable, unanswerable, or opinion seeking) on children's recall. A total of 136 children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) watched a live 15-min presentation. One week later, the children were asked 20 questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. Accuracy of children's responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. Children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to an answerable question. Overall, children maintained the same answers to only three-quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to maintain that answer when questioned again. The high percentage of changed answers within a single interview has important implications for forensic interviewing.     

Interviewing children and adults: the effect of question format on the tendency to speculate

In formal interviews it is important that interviewees indicate when they do not know the answer, rather than speculate. In this study we investigated whether question format affected the tendency to speculate. One hundred and twenty‐eight 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds, and 23 adults, were told two short stories, and were then asked questions about the stories. Half of the questions were answerable based on the information provided; the other half were not answerable. Within these categories, half of the questions were closed questions (i.e. only required a yes/no response), and half were wh‐questions (i.e. requested particular details to be provided). All participants performed at ceiling with the answerable questions. With the unanswerable questions, there was an effect of format. The majority of children and adults correctly indicated that they did not know the answer when asked unanswerable wh‐questions. However, the majority of children, and just over one‐fifth of adults, provided a response (i.e. ‘yes’ or ‘no’) to the closed unanswerable questions. The implications for interviews, particularly within a forensic context, are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of source and type of feedback on child witnesses' metamemory accuracy

This study investigated the effect of feedback on the accuracy (realism) of 12‐year‐old children's metacognitive judgments of their answers to questions about a film clip. Two types of judgments were investigated: confidence judgments (on each question) and frequency judgments (i.e. estimates of overall accuracy). The source of feedback, whether it was presented as provided by a teacher or a peer child, did not influence metacognitive accuracy. Four types of feedback were given depending on whether the participant's answer was correct and depending on whether the feedback confirmed or disconfirmed the child's answer. The children showed large overconfidence when they received confirmatory feedback but much less so when they received disconfirmatory feedback. The children gave frequency judgments implying that they had more correct answers than they actually had. No main gender differences were found for any of the measures. The results indicate a high degree of malleability in children's metacognitive judgments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Helping children correctly say "I don't know" to unanswerable questions

Adults ask children questions in a variety of contexts, for example, in the classroom, in the forensic context, or in experimental research. In such situations children will inevitably be asked some questions to which they do not know the answer, because they do not have the required information ("unanswerable" questions). When asked unanswerable questions, it is important that children indicate that they do not have the required information to provide an answer. These 2 studies investigated whether preinterview instructions (Experiment 1) or establishing a memory narrative (Experiment 2) helped children correctly indicate a lack of knowledge to unanswerable questions. In both studies, 6- and 8-year-olds participated in a classroom-based event about which they were subsequently interviewed. Some of the questions were answerable, and some were unanswerable. Results showed that preinterview instructions increased the number of younger children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable questions, without decreasing correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that demand characteristics affect children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." The opportunity to provide a narrative account increased children's appropriate "don't know" responses to unanswerable yes/no questions, and increased the number of younger children's correct responses to answerable questions. This suggests that cognitive factors also contribute to children's tendency correctly to say "I don't know." These results have implications for any context where adults need to obtain information from children through questioning, for example, a health practitioner asking about a medical condition, in classroom discourse, in the investigative interview, and in developmental psychology research.     

Alcohol Intoxication and Metamemory: Little Evidence that Moderate Intoxication Impairs Metacognitive Monitoring Processes

There is minimal research on metacognition in alcohol‐intoxicated participants. Study 1 examined metacognition across sober, intoxicated, and placebo groups, with the intoxicated group's breath alcohol concentration reaching 0.074 g/210 L on average immediately prior to the metacognition task. Participants answered cued recall general knowledge questions and provided confidence ratings and feeling‐of‐knowing judgments. They then completed a recognition (i.e., multiple choice) version of the same task, indicating an answer and a confidence rating for each question. Findings suggest that metacognitive accuracy generally did not vary across intoxication levels, although the control group's retrospective confidence judgments better discriminated between accurate and inaccurate responses than the alcohol groups in the recognition task. Study 2 surveyed academic psychologists about their expectations regarding the relation between alcohol and metacognition. Study 1's results were counter to their expectations, as respondents generally predicted a relation would be present. We discuss the implications for alcohol and memory.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does a warning help children to more accurately remember an event, to resist misleading questions, and to identify unanswerable questions?

This study examined potential effects of a warning instruction prior to an eyewitness interview including answerable and unanswerable questions, which both were either unbiased or misleading. A total of 84 six-, eight- and ten-year-old children were shown a short video about the production of sugar and they were individually questioned about it one week later. Half of the children received the warning instruction. The results revealed clear age effects in the correct answers and accuracy to answerable questions and in the appropriate "don't know" answers to unanswerable questions, but no effect of warning across all dependent measures. These findings suggest that preschool and elementary school age children cannot use such information adequately to increase their number of correct answers in the interview. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive explanations for these deficits.     

Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure in forensic interviews may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated whether adults' ability to discern true and false denials of wrongdoing by children varied as a function of the types of interview question the children were asked. Results suggest that adults are not good at detecting deceptive denials of wrongdoing by children, even when the adults view children narrate their experiences in response to recall questions rather than provide one word answers to recognition questions. In Study 1, adults exhibited a consistent “truth bias,” leading them toward believing children, regardless of whether the children's denials were true or false. In Study 2, adults were given base-rate information about the occurrence of true and false denials (50% of each). The information eliminated the adults' truth bias but did not improve their overall detection accuracy, which still hovered near chance. Adults did, however, perceive children's denials as slightly more credible when they emerged in response to recall rather than recognition questions, especially when children were honestly denying wrongdoing. Results suggest the need for caution when evaluating adults' judgments of children's veracity when the children fail to disclose abuse.     

The ontogeny of intent‐based normative judgments

When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent‐based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent‐based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent's mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children's intent‐based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children's (but not adults') normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent's intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent's false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief‐based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent‐based normative judgment.     

Guessing versus choosing – and seeing versus believing – in false belief tasks

Three‐ and 4‐year‐old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change‐of‐location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a condition in which children were forced to guess was also included, and measures of uncertainty were compared across conditions. To investigate whether children were using simpler strategies than an understanding of false belief to pass the test, we teased apart the seeing‐knowing confound in the traditional change‐of‐location task. We also investigated relations between children's performance on true and false belief tests. Results indicated that children appeared to be deliberately choosing, not guessing, in the false belief tasks. Children performed just as well whether the protagonist gained information about the object visually or verbally, indicating that children were not using a simple rule based on seeing to predict the protagonist's behaviour. A true belief condition was significantly easier for children than a false belief condition as long as it was of low processing demands. Children's success rate on the different versions of the standard false belief task was influenced by factors such as processing demands of the stories and the child's verbal abilities.     

The Effects of Adult Suggestion and Child Consistency on Young Children's Reports1

The purpose of the present study was to contrast the effects of children's response consistency and adult leading questions in a structured memory interview. Children (N = 70) who viewed a 2‐min video clip were asked 3 questions (leading, misleading, and neutral) related to the video. Children's responses (assent vs. deny) were predicted by the type of question asked by the adult (neutral, leading, and misleading), but not by the previous response given by the child or the child's age in months. Specifically, children assented the least often to misleading questions. Accuracy was predicted by both question type and in the last question–answer pair, children's previous response accuracy. These findings are discussed with relation to interview dynamics.     

Linking yesterday and tomorrow: Preschoolers' ability to report temporally displaced events

Various lines of research have recently reported links between the ability to recall past and imagine future episodes. Here I report evidence that such links exist in development. Eighty‐two children were asked to report what they did yesterday and what they are going to do tomorrow. Children who could answer one were also more likely to answer the other question. Furthermore, there was an association between the quantity of responses for past and future questions. This correlation continued to be significant even when controlling for children's capacity to answer similar questions that did not have a temporal, episodic component (e.g., ‘tell me all the things that you can think of that are red’). Together, these results are in line with the growing evidence for fundamental links in the neuro‐cognitive resources involved in thinking about past and future events.     

Behaviors speak louder than explicit reports: Implicit metacognition in 2.5‐year‐old children

Recent research has shown that children as young as age 3.5 show behavioral responses to uncertainty although they are not able to report it explicitly. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that some form of metacognition is already available to guide children's decisions before the age of 3. Two groups of 2.5‐ and 3.5‐year‐old children were asked to complete a forced‐choice perceptual identification test and to explicitly rate their confidence in each decision. Moreover, participants had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them decide if their response was correct. Our results revealed that all children asked for a cue more often after an incorrect response than after a correct response in the forced‐choice identification test, indicating a good ability to implicitly introspect on the results of their cognitive operations. On the contrary, none of these children displayed metacognitive sensitivity when making explicit confidence judgments, consistent with previous evidence of later development of explicit metacognition. Critically, our findings suggest that implicit metacognition exists much earlier than typically assumed, as early as 2.5 years of age.     

"Don't know" responding to answerable and unanswerable questions during misleading and hypnotic interviews

"Don't know" (DK) responses to interview questions are conceptually heterogeneous, and may represent uncertainty or clear statements about the contents of memory. A study examined the subjective intent of DK responses in relation to the objective status of information queried, in the context of memory distorting procedures. Participants viewed a video and responded to answerable and unanswerable questions phrased in misleading or nonmisleading formats, while hypnotized or not hypnotized. Subjective meanings of DK responses were queried, and a recognition measure assessed the contents of memory. Lower DK and accuracy rates were consistently associated with unanswerable and misleading questions. One-third of DK responses were statements that the information had no not presented. When these were recoded, accuracy estimates for answerable questions decreased and more so for hypnotized participants. These results demonstrate that DK responses convey different types of information, thus accuracy estimates in studies that permit DK responses may be misestimated. Robust risks associated with asking unanswerable questions and asking questions at all were observed. Implications for working with DK responses during interviews are discussed.     

Evidence of metacognitive awareness in young children who have experienced a repeated event

Two studies examined children's confidence judgments in the accuracy of their memories after repeated experience of an event. Children aged 5 to 6 years took part in an event once or four times, were provided with misinformation either shortly after (Study 1) or a while after (Study 2), and interviewed with yes/no recognition questions 3 months later. Children in the repeated‐experience conditions were highly confident of their accurate responses to questions about items that were identical rather than variable across occurrences, and this discrimination was best at the shorter delay. The results show that children were able to metacognitively monitor the accuracy of their responses to qualitatively different kinds of details, and indicate that age is not the only determinant of metacognitive awareness after being misled. Rather, the nature of event representations must also be considered. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Normative Social Role Concepts in Early Childhood

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4–5 and adults) explore patterns of age‐related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., “scientist”). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category‐normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a “dual character.” In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category‐based induction decisions on category‐normative traits rather than labels. Study 3 confirmed that children reason based on category‐normative traits because they view them as an obligatory part of category membership. In contrast, adults in this study viewed the category‐normative traits as informative on their own (not only as a cue to obligations). Implications for continuity and change in representations of social role categories will be discussed.     

Developmental progression in the confidence‐accuracy relationship in event recall: insights provided by a calibration perspective

The development of discrimination and realism was investigated in the event recall of 156 8‐year‐olds, 133 10‐year‐olds and 146 adults, using categorical confidence judgements. Target questions were either a mixture of misleading and unbiased (‘non‐bombardment’), or restricted to one question format (‘bombardment’). The confidence judgements of all age groups discriminated between incorrect and correct responses to unbiased questions, but with misleading questions, this ability was undermined in the children, particularly when ‘bombarded’. Calibration‐style analyses of unbiased questions revealed a systematic confidence–accuracy association across age and question mix for unbiased questions. For misleading questions, however, the absence of a drop in performance from intermediate to low confidence at all ages suggested relative underconfidence at the lowest confidence level. At high confidence levels, there was evidence of realistic congruence between confidence and performance in adults, but this was not the case in the 10‐year‐olds when bombarded with misleading questions, or in the 8‐year‐olds, regardless of bombardment. Exploratory analyses of question difficulty revealed poor calibration across ages for difficult unbiased questions, and in the 8‐year‐olds, even for easy unbiased questions when intermixed with misleading questions. Bombardment with difficult misleading questions further undermined children's calibration. Implications for the role of social and cognitive factors in the development of metacognitive monitoring are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving responding to questioning using a brief retrieval training

This research examined the effect of a brief training procedure for enhancing responding to questions about witnessed events. The training was based in research on metacognition and memory, and emphasized: attending to questions, searching for multiple responses, and weighing confidence in and considering the source of responses. In the main study, adult participants viewed a video of a burglary and after a 25 min delay half received the training. All participants were then asked answerable and unanswerable questions about the video. The training resulted in fewer errors and more rejections to unanswerable questions. Analysis of response diagnosticity indicated that responses made by the trained group were more likely to be correct responses to answerable questions. A second study showed that these findings were not due to awareness of the presence of unanswerable questions. The procedure has potential as a supplement when questioning is pursued.