Pezdek, K., Roe, C., (1997). The suggestibility of children's memory for being touched: Planting, erasing, and changing memories. Law and Human Behavior, 21(1), 95-107.
Why are they doing this study? Pezdek and Roe want to make a distinction between planting ( that is, suggesting an event occurred that did not), erasing (suggesting that an event did not occur when it actually did), and changing( suggesting that an event that occurred was actually an event that did not occur). Pezdek and Roe suggest that these events have not been distinguished between in the false memory research. Specifically, they want to address the claim that Loftus and her colleagues have made: that it may be fairly easy and common to plant memories of sexual abuse that did not occur into children's memories. Pezdek and Roe want to look at how easy it is plant memories in comparison to erasing and changing memories. Also, they want to do this by using Loftus's classic three-stage suggestibility paradigm ( if I have to explain this to those in my group, then we all should fail) instead of using a two-stage suggestibility paradigm that has been used in many of the kiddie literature. Pezdek and Roe believe that the three-stage paradigm is more externally valid since it contains a stage in which someone suggests misinformation explicitly.
Method: The design used was a 2 (age) x 5 (condition) between-subjects design.
80 four-year olds and 80 ten-year olds were tested. These participants came from both low and middle income brackets.
Conditions:
1. A is perceived and B is suggested. ( Changing memory)
2. A is perceived, suggest A is not perceived. ( Erased memory)
3. A is not perceived, but still A is suggested. ( Planting)
4. A is perceived, nothing suggested ( control for 1 and 2)
5. A is not perceived, nothing is suggested. ( control for 3)
Procedure:
Children tested individually. Child is watching slides and at a certain point, the experimenter either puts her hand on the child's hand ( event A), puts her hand on the child's shoulder ( event B), or does not touch child at all. 15 minutes later, each child is read a narrative reviewing what had occurred earlier. This is where one of the five conditions took place. They were given a memory test 25 minutes later.
Results: Uses SDT, so Jim is happy.
They were able to effectively change memories, but were not effective in erasing or planting memories. This was true for both age groups, although as expected the 10 year olds were more accurate.
What does this mean? Gives more proof for what Pezdek has been saying all along- that memories can not be planted if they are not credible. Also, Pezdek and Roe cite discrepancy detection as a possible explanation for their results- once again, saying in a new way that there has to be some overlap is the credibility of the false memory and the original memory.