Interviewer Knowledge and Preschoolers' Reasoning About Knowledge States Moderate Suggestibility

Fifty-one preschoolers listened to a story and were interviewed about the details by a knowledgeable and a naı̈ve interviewer. Half the questions were straightforward and half were misleading. One-week later, children completed a recognition test to measure story memory and a set of theory-of-mind tasks to measure reasoning about mental states related to knowing. All children showed a misinformation effect at the initial interview. At the recognition test, a knowledgeable interviewer misled children who passed false-belief tasks more often than a naı̈ve interviewer did. Knowledgeable and naı̈ve interviewers misled children who failed false-belief tasks equally often. False-belief scores predicted the tendency to be misled more often by a knowledgeable interviewer relative to a naı̈ve interviewer, after controlling for age and memory when not misled. Elaborated cognitive processing and/or memory source monitoring may mediate the results.