Preschoolers' suggestibility following exposure to biased information
has often been interpreted as indicating that memory traces have been
genuinely altered. However, young children may not recognize that the
purpose and relevance of questions in experiments on suggestibility is
to determine whether they can ignore misinformation in remembering th
e original details of stories. Instead, children may be prompted to re
gard the original story details as trivial by experimenters who are pe
rceived as having portrayed these details as unimportant or irrelevant
in that they themselves did not bother to get these right. Under such
conditions, children may interpret the biased information to mean tha
t a biased alternative was an acceptable, or even a preferred, test ch
oice when compared to the original details. We report the results of a
n investigation with 3- to 5-year-olds in which children heard a story
followed the next day by either biased, unbiased, or no information.
The children were able to identify the original story details 6 days l
ater when the questions were phrased in an explicit manner that referr
ed to the time of the information to be recalled.