Where to look first for suggestibility in young children

Preschoolers' suggestibility following exposure to biased information has often been interpreted as indicating that memory traces have been genuinely altered. However, young children may not recognize that the purpose and relevance of questions in experiments on suggestibility is to determine whether they can ignore misinformation in remembering the original details of stories. Instead, children may be prompted to regard the original story details as trivial by experimenters who are perceived as having portrayed these details as unimportant or irrelevant in that they themselves did not bother to get these right. Under such conditions, children may interpret the biased information to mean that a biased alternative was an acceptable, or even a preferred, test choice when compared to the original details. We report the results of an investigation with 3- to 5-year-olds in which children heard a story followed the next day by either biased, unbiased, or no information. The children were able to identify the original story details 6 days later when the questions were phrased in an explicit manner that referred to the time of the information to be recalled.