This study examines the impact of the inviting speculation technique on the later statements of children about an experienced event. Schreiber mentions two theories that lead to the assumption that asking a witness to speculate about a specific event might result in false statements.

• Misinformation Effect: This approach explains that providing a witness with additional dissimilar information after observing an event results in increased memory for the postevent information in place of the original event information (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978).
• Source Monitoring: If a witness is not able to correctly remember the source of the memory, the memory can, by mistake, be attributed to the experience of the event rather than an experience outside of the event.

Children watched a thirty minute clown show involving some unusual actions with common objects. After watching the show, children from the experimental condition were invited to speculate as to what other actions could be performed with the objects, whereas the children from the control group were not. The prediction is that children in the experimental condition are at risk of confusing their speculations with what they originally saw and experienced, and therefore will report more highly probable but false answers than the children from the control condition.

• The children of the control group were asked for example "Remember the toothbrush? What did the clown do with the toothbrush?"

• The children of the experimental group were asked, "Remember the toothbrush? What did the clown do with the toothbrush?" along with the question "What else could the clown have done with the toothbrush?"

Five to six months later- Children were interviewed a second time using the same procedure as before.

Results

• There was no effect of speculation at the first testing session
• However at the later testing session (5 - 6 months) subjects in the speculation condition were more likely to mention the highly probable event.

The second experiment was conducted using a within subjects design. So, participants were invited to speculate about half of the experimental items and the rest of the items were used a control.

Results (See Table 2)

Like in the previous study, there was an effect of speculation but only after the longer delay.

Discussion

Experiment 2 replicates the results of Experiment 1 that the manipulation of being invited to speculate about alternative actions increases the unreliability of answers in the long run. Experiment 2 also shows that the long-term memory performance relates to a metastrategy because children produced more false answers not only for experimental but for the control items.

Taken together, these two experiments indicate that there might be two different cognitive processes responsible for the short and long term effects of inviting speculation technique.

Within a 2 week time frame, children can be lead to mistake their speculation for the original information, and after 5 to 6 months, this interviewing technique can lead to the retrieval of a metastrategy that the purpose of the questioning about an event was to give speculated, creative answers.