Children's memories

Question 1

What is free recall?

Answer 1

-Asking child to tell you everything that happened
-Goodman et at found that in a stressful situation children gave accurate accounts, however 41% made a false ID of the nurse
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Question 2

What are the two types of question?

Answer 2

• Open questions- kids showed 91% accuracy compared to 45% accuracy with closed questions
• may not be effective with smaller children
• closed questions- lots of evidence for decreased accuracy
• yet still used a lot in the UK

Question 3

What are nonsensical questions? (Hughes and Grieve)

Answer 3

• Hughes found most kids answered non-sensical questions
• Waterman found that when the question was closed every child answered
• However when the questions were open, 95% said they didnt know
• When a child is asked a closed question, they take it to mean they should know the answer

Question 4

What were the findings of Poole and White’s study?

Answer 4

• repeated open questions yielded good accuracy
• closed questions when repeated, younger children were more likely to change their response, became increasingly confident in these and were and embellished them

Question 5

Define suggestibility..

Answer 5

• the extent to which individuals come to accept and incorporate post-event information into their memory recollections
• interrogative suggestibility
• misinformation effects
• autosuggestion

Question 6

What did Thompson et al find in his study regarding interviewer bias?

Answer 6

• With a neutral interview reports were accurate
• biased interviewer- kids made many more errors
• when questioned by parents later children continued the false events suggested by the interviewer

Question 7

What is misinformation?

Answer 7

• introduction of false information suggested by the interviewer
• Bruck et al- false information was remembered by 5 year olds a year later
• misleading suggestions were incorporated into children’s reports
• new information provided by the child after the initial interview is highly likely to be inaccurate
• caused by inability to retrieve memory or gap filling stratergy

Question 8

What are the suggestibility effects?

Answer 8

• Vacant slop hypothesis- the vacant slot in the memory is filled with suggestible information
• co-existence hypothesis- accurate and suggested memory are available but the false memory is more recent
• demand characteristics-belief that the false memory is the required one otherwise why would an adult tell them