Children who experienced a repeated event only appear less accurate in a second interview than those who experienced a unique event.

When children have experienced a repeated event, reports of experienced details may be inconsistently reported across multiple interviews. In 3 experiments, we explored consistency of children's reports of an instance of a repeated event after a long delay (Exp. 1, N = 53, Mage = 7.95 years; Exp. 2, N = 70, Mage = 5.77 years, Exp. 3, N = 59, Mage = 4.88 years). In all experiments, children either experienced 1 or 4 activity sessions, followed at a relatively short delay (days or weeks) by an initial memory test. Then, following a longer delay (4 months or 1 year), children were reinterviewed with the same memory questions. We analyzed the consistency of children's memory reports across the 2 interviews, as well as forgetting, reminiscence, and accuracy, defined with both narrow and broad criteria. A highly consistent pattern was observed across the 3 experiments with children who experienced a single event appearing more consistent than children who experienced a repeated event. We conclude that inconsistencies across multiple interviews can be expected from children who have experienced repeated events and these inconsistencies are often reflective of accurate, but different, recall. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social and cognitive factors associated with children's secret-keeping for a parent.

This study examined children's secret-keeping for a parent and its relation to trust, theory of mind, secrecy endorsement, and executive functioning (EF). Children (N = 107) between 4 and 12 years of age participated in a procedure wherein parents broke a toy and asked children to promise secrecy. Responses to open-ended and direct questions were examined. Overall, secret-keeping increased with age and promising to keep the secret was related to fewer disclosures in open-ended questioning. Children who kept the secret in direct questioning exhibited greater trust and better parental ratings of EF than children who disclosed the secret. Findings highlight the importance of both social and cognitive factors in secret-keeping development.

Failing to report details of an event: a review of the directed forgetting procedure and applications to reports of childhood sexual abuse.

Recent reviews of child sexual abuse (CSA) disclosure indicate that many victims delay disclosing abuse for some period of time (e.g., London, Bruck, Ceci, & Shuman, 2005). During this period of non-disclosure, CSA victims may avoid thinking about or discussing their abuse experiences. Some scholars argue that this may lead to a directed forgetting (DF) effect, whereby later recall of the unrehearsed memories becomes more difficult (e.g., M. A. Epstein & Bottoms, 2002). This paper reviews the DF literature and discusses the potential contribution of DF to silence. The review begins with a description of the basic DF protocol used, discusses underlying mechanisms thought to be responsible for the DF effect, and then examines applications of the DF protocol to memory for emotion-laden word lists and autobiographical events. Overall, the applied studies demonstrate that DF effects generalise beyond memory for innocuous word lists; however, we describe several important avenues of research that require further exploration. Most noteworthy, and particularly relevant to the common application of DF to memory for CSA, are those studies that examine the influence of DF on children's autobiographical memory.

Lying in the elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding.

The development of lying to conceal one's own transgression was examined in school-age children. Children (N=172) between 6 and 11 years of age were asked not to peek at the answer to a trivia question while left alone in a room. Half of the children could not resist temptation and peeked at the answer. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, the majority of children lied. However, children's subsequent verbal statements, made in response to follow-up questioning, were not always consistent with their initial denial and, hence, leaked critical information to reveal their deceit. Children's ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent verbal statements increased with age. This ability is also positively correlated with children's 2nd-order belief scores, suggesting that theory of mind understanding plays an important role in children's ability to lie consistently.

What children recall about a repeated event when one instance is different from the others.

This research examined whether a memorable and unexpected change (deviation details) presented during 1 instance of a repeated event facilitated children's memory for that instance and whether a repeated event facilitated children's memory for deviation details. In Experiments 1 and 2, 8-year-olds (N = 167) watched 1 or 4 live magic shows. Children were interviewed about the last or only show, which did or did not contain deviation details. Children reported more accurate information about the instance when deviation details were presented than when they were not, but repeated experience did not improve memory for deviation details. In Experiment 3, children (N = 145; 6- to 11-year-olds) participated in 4 magic shows and answered questions about each one. Deviation details were manipulated such that they caused a change in how the show was experienced (continuous) or had no such effect on the rest of the show (discrete). Younger, but not older, children's recall of all instances improved when a continuous deviation occurred compared to no deviation. Implications for how deviation details are represented in memory, as well as forensic applications of the findings, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Perceptions and predictors of children's credibility of a unique event and an instance of a repeated event.

Perceptions of children's credibility were studied in two experiments wherein participants watched a videotape of a 4- to 5- or a 6- to 7-year old child report details of a play session that had been experienced once (single-event) or was the last in a series of four similar play sessions (repeat-event). The child's report was classified as high or low accurate. In Experiments 1 and 2, reports of repeat-event children were judged to be less believable on several measures. In Experiment 1, younger children were viewed as less credible than older children. In both experiments, neither undergraduates nor community members correctly discriminated between high- and low-accurate reports. Content analysis in Study 3 revealed the relationship between age and event frequency and children's credibility ratings was mediated by the internal consistency of children's reports. Recent research on children's reports of instances of repeated events has identified several challenges facing children who report repeated abuse. These data bring to light another potential difficulty for these children.

Children's memory for complex autobiographical events: does spacing of repeated instances matter?

Often, when children testify in court they do so as victims of a repeated offence and must report details of an instance of the offence. One factor that may influence children's ability to succeed in this task concerns the temporal distance between presentations of the repeated event. Indeed, there is a substantial amount of literature on the "spacing effect" that suggests this may be the case. In the current research, we examined the effect of temporal spacing on memory reports for complex autobiographical events. Children participated in one or four play sessions presented at different intervals. Later, children were suggestively questioned, and then participated in a memory test. Superior recall of distributed events (a spacing effect) was found when the delay to test was 1 day (Experiment 1) but there was little evidence for a spacing effect when the delay was 1 week (Experiment 2). Implications for understanding children's recall of repeated autobiographical events are discussed.