Interviewer knowledge and preschoolers' reasoning about knowledge states moderate suggestibility

Fifty-one preschoolers listened to a story and were interviewed about the d etails by a knowledgeable and a naive interviewer. Half the questions were straightforward and half were misleading. One-week later, children complete d a recognition test to measure story memory and a set of theory-of-mind ta sks to measure reasoning about mental states related to knowing. All childr en showed a misinformation effect at the initial interview. At the recognit ion test, a knowledgeable interviewer misled children who passed false-beli ef tasks more often than a naive interviewer did, Knowledgeable and naive i nterviewers misled children who failed false-belief tasks equally often. Fa lse-belief scores predicted the tendency to be misled more often by a knowl edgeable interviewer relative to a naive interviewer, after controlling for age and memory when not misled. Elaborated cognitive processing and/ or me mory source monitoring may mediate the results.