Children's memory and source monitoring of real-life and televised events

It is theoretically and practically important to know whether children conf use memories of different events to which they have been exposed. In two st udies, children aged 4 and 10 years watched two related events; one event w as live and the other was a video recording. Half of the children watched a video that was similar to the live event, and the remaining children watch ed a video that was dissimilar. One week later, children in the similar con dition confused the two events more than those in the different condition w hen freely recalling (Experiments 1 and 2) and in response to focused quest ions (Experiment 1). The 10-year olds reported more information than the 4- year olds and were more accurate overall, confusing the events less than th e 4-year olds. When the events were presented 1 day after each other (Exper iment 2), the reports were more inaccurate than when the events were separa ted by a 2-day interval, but this did not affect the number of rimes the ev ents were confused. The results suggest that mere exposure to similar event s in different media can contaminate memories, and the findings are discuss ed in relation to children's sourer monitoring and eyewitness memory.