Improving children's recall of an occurrence of a repeated event: is it a matter of helping them to generate options?

Full Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to explore whether children's recall of an occurrence of a repeated event could be improved by encouraging them to consider various details that occurred across a series of events prior to making a judgment about which details were included in the target (to-be-recalled) occurrence. Experiment 1 explored whether children's recall of the target occurrence was better after the interviewer presented all the items from the series prior to the child identifying the final item. Experiment 2 explored whether having the children generate all the items facilitated their subsequent recall of the target occurrence. Finally, Experiment 3 directly compared the effectiveness of the above 2 procedures. Regardless of the children's age, the retention interval, or the type of item, children's capacity to identify which details were included in a target occurrence was enhanced when they were initially provided with all the possible details from the series of events. However, without relying on the interviewer to generate the options, the benefit of the technique was directly contingent on the children's ability to generate content details; this was a distinct source of difficulty for the children. Indeed, having children generate options had no beneficial effect on decisions about the temporal position of items unless performance was made conditional on the children's ability to remember the relevant details in the first place. The implications of the findings for the legal setting and for future research are discussed.

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Author information

Author/s: Powell, Martine B (MB); Thomson, Donald M (DM);

Affiliation: School of Psychology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, 3125, Australia. mbpowell(-atsign-)deakin.edu.au

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Law and human behavior (Law Hum Behav), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Aug; vol 27 (issue 4) : pp 365-84

Dates: Created 2003/08/14; Completed 2003/09/24; Revised 2007/11/15;

PMID: 12916226, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Humans
Interviews as Topic
Male
Mental Recall
Repression

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