EFFECTS OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND RESPONSE BIAS UPON RECOGNITION MEMORY FOR A STORY - IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILDRENS EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

The present study was designed to evaluate the integration hypothesis and the response bias hypothesis for explaining the fragility of child ren's eyewitness memory, by varying the plausibility of postevent info rmation and the strength of response bias in recognition tests. Presch ool children were told a story in which a boy named Ken saw a housebre aker stealing various objects and the postevent information was also i ncorporated into the story. The first recognition lest was administere d immediately following the presentation of an interpolated story, and the second recognition test was administered 10 weeks later. The resu lts indicated that high-plausibility objects tended Io be recognized a s the stolen objects in the second recognition test, and that recognit ion accuracy was higher for a new-distractor condition than for a misl eading-distractor condition. These findings were interpreted as sugges ting that the memory representation of the story might be changed thro ugh the integration processes and/or rendered inaccessible in terms of the response bias.