Projects

Headed by Dr. Gabrielle Principe, the research carried out in the Ursinus Child Memory Lab focuses on memory development and factors that affect the accuracy of young children’s reports of personally experienced events. In addition to contributing to a basic understanding of children’s memory, this work has implications for understanding factors that can influence the accuracy of children’s legal testimony and for developing interviewing procedures in forensic contexts.

• 1. How Naturally Occurring Conversations Can Distort Children’s Memory For Their Experiences

• Increased reliance on the testimony of young witnesses in the legal system has motivated much of the recent research on children’s memory. Investigators have shown that when exposed to highly suggestive questioning techniques, children can be led to fabricate accounts of fictitious events that are as spontaneous, elaborate, and coherent as reports of experienced events. This body of work, however, has focused on the effects of misinformation suggested during the course of structured interviews without providing any baseline information about the ways in which children’s memories are transformed during the normal course of discussing past events with others. Preschoolers may be especially prone to confuse details picked up from conversations with others with details from actually experienced events because they often have trouble remembering the sources of their mental images. The purpose of our research is to explore how everyday conversational interactions can affect children’s recollections of the past.
• In our studies, children participate in an age-appropriate event at their daycare center or school, such as a staged archaeological dig or a magic show. Following the event, some of the children are exposed to a conversation or rumor that contains details that are inconsistent with what was experienced. After various delay intervals, the children are questioned about the original event using a mock forensic interview. Our findings indicate that, at least under some conditions, young children readily adopt information transmitted during naturally occurring conversations into their own recollections. For example, we have found that false rumors planted by adults can lead high levels of preschoolers to claim that they have actual experienced rumored but fictitious events. We also have shown that naturally occurring conversations among peers can lead preschoolers to report actually seeing fictitious events that their classmates only heard rumors about. Importantly, these errors are seen in children’s reports even in the absence of direct exposure to misinformation from adults and even when children are interviewed in an optimally nonsuggestive manner.

• 2. How Children’s Fantasy Beliefs Can Bring About False Memories

• The unprecedented involvement of young witnesses in the legal system has served to focus attention on the potential negative consequences of children’s confusions between fantasy and reality. In one of the most highly publicized child abuse cases, for example, children alleged that Kelley Michaels put cars on top of them and turned one child into a mouse. Ample evidence demonstrates that these sorts of fantastic allegations can be brought about by suggestive interviewing, but it seems likely that children’s proclivity for fantastical thinking might at times lead to outlandish claims even in the absence of suggestion. The subtlety with which children move in and out of fantasy can make the task of forensic interviewers -- who are intent on gathering only truthful information – quite difficult. For example, if an interviewer does not recognize when a child slips into fantasy, he or she may unknowing assist in the fabrication of a make-believe story.
• With these issues in mind, the purpose of our research in this area is to explore how children’s fantastical beliefs in common childhood mythical figures, such as the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, might distort their memory for past events. Some of our findings suggest that beliefs in fantastical figures can be a double-edged sword: they can lead to embellishments that can boost the elaborateness and organization of children’s reports of the past – but all of this may come with a reduction in accuracy. Our data also indicate that when children waver in their beliefs about the reality of mythical figures, they may be less likely to entertain their fantasies when they perceive the situation as requiring an accurate response than when they perceive the situation as an invitation to engage in fantasy. These findings suggest that the likelihood that children may interpret a legally relevant conversation as an invitation to engage in fantasy might be increased when an adult asks about the sorts of acts alleged of the defendants in a number of the early child abuse cases. Asking young children about drinking urine and eating a cake made of excrement (things queried about in the Kelly Michaels case), when such things did not happen, might inadvertently put a child into a pretend frame in which she elaborates on the fantasy initiated by her conversational partner.