Shortly after viewing a video of a theft, 5-and 7-year-old children and adults were interviewed with free recall and either misleading or unbiased-leading questions. After a 2-day delay, participants were interviewed with free recall and recognition questions administered by either the same or a dierent interviewer. Results from day 1 replicate previous ®ndings with levels of recall and resistance to suggestibility increasing with age. Counter to predictions, correct recognition performance on day 2 was greater for some participants interviewed by the same as opposed to a dierent interviewer, and incorrect recognition was greater for all groups of participants for those interviewed by a dierent as opposed to the same interviewer. Results are discussed in terms of the role of context dependence on memory performance.There has been an avalanche of research in the past decade on children's susceptibility to suggestion, and results have shown that younger children are more likely to agree with misinformation provided or suggested by an interviewer than are older children and adults (see Ceci and Bruck, 1993 for reviews). However, young children's compliance with the suggestion of an interviewer is not necessarily an indication that they actually changed their memory of the event. Rather, young children's erroneous responses can often be attributed to the social-demand characteristics of the interview (i.e. telling the interviewer what he or she wants to hear), and not to underlying changes in the memory representation, per se.The importance of demand characteristics on young children's suggestibility was illustrated in a study by Cassel et al. (1996). In their study, kindergarten, grade-2 and grade-4 children, and college students were shown a video depicting the theft of a bicycle. One week later, participants were asked for free recall of the event (e.g.`Tell
In this study we investigated the extent to which the high levels of recall and organization observed when children are asked to recall their classmates* names (class recall) can be attributed to organizational versus item-specific effects. Levels of clustering in class recall were elevated when first, third, and fifth-grade children were constrained to recall their classmates' names according to specific organizational schemes (either sex or seating arrangement). However, there was no evidence that changes in levels or styles of organization influenced levels of memory performance or which names were recalled. The results were interpreted as indicating that some of the benefits on memory of an elaborated knowledge base cannot be attributed to differences in organization (either strategic or automatic) but rather are due to differences in the ease with which individual items can be retrieved.Recently, researchers interested in the development of strategic remembering have hypothesized that age changes in content knowledge or knowledge base are responsible for many of the developmental differences observed in children's memory functioning (e.g., Bjorklund, 1985;Chi, 1978;1981; Ornstein & Naus, in press). There have been a number of demonstrations indicating that children's memory performance can be influenced by manipulating the familiarity of the to-be-remembered information. For example, memory performance of children between the ages of 6 and 12 years is greater for items judged to be typical of their taxonomic categories than for items judged to be less typical (e.g., Bjork-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.