What is the issue at hand?

Essentially, this is an article that examines just how much credibility- if any- one should give to the hearsay testimony of mothers regarding their children. The authors acknowledge that the legal systems prevailing notion on the matter is the following: if the testimony is given by adults with no reason to lie, then by golly! we should believe that the testimony is accurate. Well, given our background on memory ( we will forgive the legal system for not knowing that they can not remember anything!), we should be able to come up with many reasons as why we should doubt this reasoning. Especially, reminds Bruck, Ceci and Francoeur , we need to be aware that conversations with children require more work than do conversations with other adults ( although, we all know adults with whom it takes a lot of energy to converse with--present company excluded of course). Thus, when speaking with children, we have to pay a lot of attention to our own efforts and may loose some of the actual conversation as a result.

So, what are they looking at and what is the previous literature?

The authors want to look at gist ( what is the content?) and verbatim ( what was the structure and what were the exact phrasing?) memories. They believe that verbatim is especially significant because it allows a determination of whether or not the child was asked misleading questions or if the child was subjected to repeated questions. Previous research by Ceci and Bruck has shown that when asked open-ended, nonrepetitive questions, a child's testimony is most reliable.

Previous research has indicated that adults have poor verbatim recall but good gist recall. In other words, adults can pick out the paraphrased version of a sentence that they were presented with only seconds before, but not necessarily pick out the verbatim version ( that is, the original sentence). An exception to this is in cases when the verbatim is considered to be of high interactional content (for example, a joke). In these cases, gist and verbatim are similar.

Also, previous research shows that performance is low when subjects are asked to give a free recall on a conversation.

Note that this research is important because juries are likely to treat hearsay testimony from an adult about what a child said as being as believeable as direct testimony from the child (Golding, Sanchez & Sego, 1997).

So, if we know all this, why do this study?

Well, the obvious is that the past literature is with adults, not children. But, also, the past literature does not look explicitly at memory for the structure of conversation which as stated before is important in determining the exact questioning of a child in a hearsay situation.

Also, when looking at the memory for structure of conversation ( in this case, an interview), it is important for trial purposes to test source monitoring ( you knew, I had to mention source monitoring) abilities. After all, a source monitoring error in hearsay testimony is quite significant. However, the authors were unsure as how exactly to hypothesize this.

The authors also wanted examine the possibility that forewarning the mothers that their memory would be tested would lead to higher recall and recognition. The authors believed that the forewarned mothers would have higher gist and verbatim.

Participants

• 24 mothers and their 3-5 year old children.

• Mothers were asked to participate in a study concerning parent-child conversation.
• Play time: 20 minutes between child and RA. Consisted six activities, one of which was a surprise event of a male confederate entering the room looking for his fire hat, asking the RA for his crayon back, blowing the child a kiss.
• Mothers were told to find out as much detail as they could about the events that happened in play time. They were given a list of activities that the child may have done ( only 2 actually took place) and told that a surprise event occurred that they should find out about. Some mothers were also told that their memory for the interview would later be tested.

• Mother interviewed child and the interview was videotaped. Recognition tests constructed from a transcript of videotape.
• Follow up test: Mothers were told the purpose. Asked to give a free recall of what happened in as much detail and in a dialogue form. Next, mother was given a recognition test. Mothers were told that in some instances the passages may have mistakes, or been changed. If they noticed an error, they were to indicate what was wrong.

• Measures used: recall and recognition.
• No effects of the forewarning of the mothers.
• Free recall utterances pretty accurate in gist ( 88%) and in verbatim (74%).
• However, they were incomplete in the following ways:

• Gist: Mothers omitted some central aspects of the conversation. For example, only 50% recalled the surprise event ( yet, all had been instructed specifically about this event).

• Structure of the Conversation:

• only 47% of free recall utterances were accurate in terms of structure.

• 30% of utterances had no speaker specification.

• Only 16% of major questions asked were recalled.

• As to the recognition task, recognition of gist information was more accurate than recognition of verbatim information. Mothers had a poor performance (25%)when attempting to pinpoint problems with the structure (verbatim). They made role assignment errors and could not tell if the child's response was a result of prompting or simply spontaneous answer. Mothers were better at finding the gist changes (48%).

I will tell you what I think and you can agree or refute.

 
 

University of Arkansas

Department of Psychology

Lampinen Lab

False Memory Reading Group

False Memory Reading Group Fall 1999