Explicitly questioning the nature of suggestibility in preschoolers' memory and retention

In research designed to investigate children's suggestible responses on memory tests, 190 preschoolers were read a short story. The same day or six days later, they were exposed to information that was either consistent with the original story details or inconsistent and misleading. One and seven weeks after hearing the story, the children were tested on two types of recognition tasks that involved a choice either between the original and misleading information or between the original and new information with questions that were either explicit or nonexplicit as to the time of the information to be reported. At the 1-week test, children who were exposed to misleading information were significantly less accurate under nonexplicit questioning in recognizing the original from the misleading information than were children presented with consistent information. With explicit questioning, this difference was not significant. When the choice for the children was between original and new items following exposure to delayed misleading postevent information, explicit questioning resulted in significantly more accurate responses at the 7-week test than did nonexplicit questioning. Children questioned explicitly rather than nonexplicitly were more likely to maintain correct responses on both tests. The results are discussed in terms of conversational processes and competing forms of representation in memory retention.