THE EFFECTS OF INTERACTING IN REPEATED EVENTS ON CHILDRENS EYEWITNESSMEMORY AND SOURCE MONITORING

Accurate eyewitness memory of an event may be affected by exposure to and degree of involvement with other related events. In this study, we investigated whether interacting in a related video event affected ch ildren's accounts of a real-life target event, and whether interacting in the target event affected memory for different details within the target event. Four-, 6-, and 9-year-old children interacted with an ad ult who made a puppet. Half of the children in each age group also int eracted with a video of a similar event (interactive condition) and ha lf sat and watched the video without interacting (watch condition). Wh en asked nonmisleading questions a week later, children in the interac tive condition confused the two events more than those in the watch co ndition. The 4-year-olds in the interactive condition reported a highe r rate of confusions in free recall than the 4-year-olds in the watch condition. There were no effects of interaction on responses to mislea ding questions. The 6- and 9-year-olds were more accurate at answering questions related to actions they themselves had performed than actio ns performed by the experimenter, although this pattern was reversed f or the 4-year-olds. The results are discussed in terms of children's e yewitness memory. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.