PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Research Report
SOURCE MONITORING REDUCES THE SUGGESTIBILITY OF
PRESCHOOL CHILDREN
Jessica W. Giles,1 Alison Gopnik,2 and Gail D. Heyman1
1
University of California at San Diego and 2University of California at Berkeley

Abstract—The relation between source monitoring and suggestibility tional theory of the mind (Gopnik & Graf, 1988), and may be related
was examined among preschool children. Thirty-two 3- to 5-year-olds to development of the frontal lobes of the brain (see Schacter, Kagan,
were simultaneously presented with a brief story in two different mo- & Leichtman, 1995).
dalities, as a silent video vignette and a spoken narrative. Each modal- Several researchers have proposed a link between suggestibility
ity presented unique information about the story, but the information in and difficulties with source monitoring (Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Leicht-
the two versions was mutually compatible. The children were then man & Ceci, 1995; Leichtman, Morse, Dixon, & Spiegel, 2000; Lind-
asked a series of questions, including questions about the source (mo- say & Johnson, 1989; Poole & Lindsay, 2001; Roberts & Blades,
dality) of story details, and leading questions about story details (to as- 1998; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). Source monitoring and decreased sug-
sess suggestibility). Performance on the source-monitoring questions gestibility are each thought to be related to an understanding of the
was highly correlated with the ability to resist suggestion. In addition, representational processes of mind (Welch-Ross, Diecidue, & Miller,
children who were asked source-monitoring questions prior to leading 1997). Source monitoring is also thought to encourage the use of
questioning were less susceptible to suggestion than were those who stringent decision criteria, which may help to reduce suggestibility
were asked the leading questions first. This study provides evidence (Lindsay & Johnson, 1989). Older children and adults appear less sug-
that source monitoring can play a causal role in reducing the suggest- gestible in contexts that require them to monitor sources than in con-
ibility of preschool children. texts that do not require this (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1995; Lindsay &
Johnson, 1989; Multhaup et al., 1999). However, the relationship be-
tween source monitoring and suggestibility in young children is un-
Human memory for events is a reconstruction of the past rather
clear.
than a veridical representation of events as they actually happened (Fi-
The present study had two goals designed to clarify the nature of
vush, 1994; Multhaup, De Leonardis, & Johnson, 1999; Tessler &
the relationship between source monitoring and suggestibility in pre-
Nelson, 1994). One factor that influences the reporting of event mem-
school children. The first goal was to determine whether there are in-
ories is the extent to which a person is misled by suggested, postevent
dividual differences in source-monitoring ability that are associated
information. Suggestibility refers to the incorporation of incorrect
with the ability to resist suggestion. Leichtman et al. (2000) found that
postevent information into a memory report (Ceci, Huffman, Smith, &
preschool children’s performance on an age-appropriate source-moni-
Loftus, 1994; Rudy & Goodman, 1991). Under many circumstances,
toring task (Gopnik & Graf’s, 1988, drawer task) predicted their rela-
young children are more suggestible than older children and adults.
tive level of suggestibility concerning an unrelated event. The present
For example, although young children tend to perform as well as
study examined whether preschoolers’ ability to recall the sources of
adults on free-recall questions, they are more suggestible than adults
information about an event can predict their resistance to suggestion
in the face of leading questions (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Young chil-
about that same event.
dren’s increased suggestibility has implications for socialization, aca-
The second goal of the present study was to determine whether
demic learning, and eyewitness testimony.
presenting a source-monitoring task can improve young children’s re-
Factors that contribute to young children’s increased suggestibility
sistance to suggestion, and to examine whether any such resistance
include lack of experience; cognitive, maturational, and linguistic lim-
might go beyond any effects of monitoring memory details more gen-
itations; differential social status; and a desire to please (see Ceci &
erally. Such a finding would go beyond demonstrating a correlation
Bruck, 1993, for a review). The present study investigated whether
between source monitoring and suggestibility and demonstrate that
deficits in source monitoring, defined as making attributions about the
encouraging young children to monitor sources actually causes them
origins of one’s memory (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993),
to be less suggestible. In a study consistent with this possibility,
might also have implications for young children’s suggestibility.
Thierry, Spence, and Memon (2000) found that 3- and 4-year-olds
Young children have consistent difficulties identifying the sources
who were oriented to the sources of their knowledge were more likely
of their knowledge. For example, 3-year-olds have difficulty distin-
to say “I don’t know” in response to subsequent leading questions than
guishing whether they learned about an object through sight, touch,
were children who were not first oriented to sources. However, there is
communication, or inference (Gopnik & Graf, 1988; O’Neill, Asting-
little evidence that directing children to monitor sources improves
ton, & Flavell, 1992; O’Neill & Gopnik, 1991; Wimmer, Hogrefe, &
their accuracy in response to subsequent leading questions.
Perner, 1988). However, children’s performance on source-monitoring
We were interested in children’s performance in the face of leading
tasks improves greatly between the ages of 3 and 6 years. This devel-
questions largely because young children are thought to have particu-
opment appears to be part of a general shift toward a more representa-
lar difficulty with such questions (see Ceci & Bruck, 1993). In the
present study, we asked two questions: Do individual differences in
source-monitoring performance concerning a specific event predict in-
Address correspondence to Jessica W. Giles, Department of Psychology, dividual differences in resistance to suggestion concerning the same
University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093- event? Does encouraging children to actively monitor sources improve
0109; e-mail: giles@psy.ucsd.edu. their accuracy in responding to subsequent leading questions?

288 Copyright © 2002 American Psychological Society VOL. 13, NO. 3, MAY 2002
 PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Jessica W. Giles, Alison Gopnik, and Gail D. Heyman

METHOD

Overview
Preschool children were presented with a story about a young boy
feeding his dog. The story was presented in two modalities simulta-
neously: as a silent video and as a spoken narrative read by the experi-
menter. Following presentation of the story, the children were asked a
series of questions. The answer to any given question could come
from only one of the two possible sources. The questions were orga-
nized into four different tasks, of which each participant received
three. Participants were randomly assigned to condition.
For all participants, the first two tasks included a suggestion task,
designed to measure children’s resistance to suggestion, and one of
two monitoring tasks. One of the possible monitoring tasks, source-
monitoring task A (SMA), measured the children’s ability to identify
the source of specific story details. The other monitoring task, the de-
tail-monitoring task, measured the children’s recall of story details.
The nature of the monitoring task, and the order in which the first
two tasks were presented, was varied in a 2 (task type)  2 (task or-
der) between-subjects factorial design. The task-order manipulation
was used to assess whether encouraging children to monitor sources
would increase their resistance to subsequent leading questions. The
task-type manipulation was included to determine whether any re-
duced suggestibility effects would be specific to source monitoring, or
whether they would also be obtained with a detail-monitoring task that
encourages elaborative processing of an event memory (see Pezdek &
Roe, 1995, concerning the possibility that elaborative processing of an
event memory reduces suggestibility).
All participants were given the same third task, source-monitoring
task B (SMB), which was similar in form to SMA, but contained dif-
ferent questions. Figure 1 summarizes the design of this study.

Participants
The participants were 32 preschool children (13 boys, 19 girls; mean Fig. 1. The 2 (task type)  2 (task order) factorial design, indicating
age  4.25, range: 3.17–5.25) recruited from a university preschool. the tasks given to each group, and the order in which the tasks were
presented.

Procedure
Children were shown a 1-min silent video vignette accompanied Detail-monitoring task
by narration by the experimenter. They were then given a series of
three tasks of six questions each. Tasks were selected and ordered ac- In this task, the children were asked to recall story details. These
cording to a 2  2 factorial design (see Overview). The next sections questions consisted of two parts: a general question (e.g., “Is the little
describe the tasks. boy the one who always feeds the dog?”) followed by a specific ques-
tion about the same topic (e.g., “How many times a day does the dog
get fed?”).
SMA and SMB
In both of these tasks, the children were asked to distinguish be- Suggestion task
tween two sources of knowledge about the story. Each question con-
tained two parts: an initial general question (e.g., “What color is the This task assessed children’s ability to resist suggestion in the form
farm house that the little boy lives in?”) followed by a question asking of leading questions. Each of these questions consisted of a declara-
participants to identify the source of their knowledge (e.g., “Did I tive phrase, followed by a question asking for agreement with what
tell you what color it was, or did you see it on the tape?”). If a child was said (e.g., “The little boy and his dog were standing in mud,
did not respond, the question was repeated. Scoring of the source weren’t they?”).The declarative phrase always contained erroneous in-
questions was independent of responses to the corresponding general formation. Performance on this task was the dependent variable
questions. Items in SMA and SMB were counterbalanced across par- (scores ranged from 0 to 6, with 6 indicating accurate response to all
ticipants. six questions). The questions in the different monitoring tasks (source

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 PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Source Monitoring

monitoring vs. detail monitoring) did not differentially relate to the reinforcing memory details may reduce forced-choice errors following
content of the leading questions in the suggestion task. misinformation).
Does elaborating on the details of a memory reduce suggestibility?
RESULTS To examine this possibility, we compared performance on the sugges-
tion task for children who received the detail-monitoring task first (M 
2.00) and those who received it second (M  1.00). The scores of
Individual Differences
children who were encouraged to monitor details did not differ signif-
Does source-monitoring performance predict resistance to sugges- icantly from those of children who were not, F(1, 14)  1.56, p  .05.
tion? Across all participants, performance on SMB was highly corre-
lated with performance on the suggestion task, r(30)  .82, p  .001.
This correlation was still significant when the participants who had
DISCUSSION
completed SMA and those who had completed the detail-monitoring This study produced two main findings. First, the ability to monitor
task were considered separately, r(14)  .92, p  .01, and r(14)  sources was highly correlated with the ability to resist suggestion in
.57, p  .05, respectively.1 The correlation remained significant when the form of leading questions. This result held even in an analysis con-
age was partialed out, r(30)  .80, p  .001. Age was marginally cor- trolling for age.
related with performance on the suggestion task, r(30)  .34, p  .10, Second, presentation of a source-monitoring task reduced chil-
and with performance on SMB, r(30)  .37, p  .05. (There was no dren’s susceptibility to subsequent leading questions. Preschool chil-
significant age difference across groups.) Finally, resistance to sugges- dren were more able to defend their original event memories from
tion was not correlated with performance on the detail-monitoring intrusion by conflicting postevent information when they had recently
task, r(14)  .24, p  .05. These results indicate that children’s ability been encouraged to think about the sources of their knowledge than
to monitor sources is associated with resistance to suggestion. Further, when they had not been so encouraged. In contrast, children who were
this relationship does not appear to be a function of age. asked about details of their event memory prior to leading questioning
showed no reduced suggestibility effect.
Effect of Source Monitoring on Suggestibility This latter result is in apparent conflict with the work of Leichtman
et al. (2000), who found that both source and content reinforcement
Might asking children about the sources of their knowledge reduce reduced 5- and 6-year olds’ errors following the presentation of misin-
their suggestibility? To investigate this possibility, we compared formation. Several methodological differences might help account for
scores on the suggestion task across all four treatment groups (see Ta- these discrepant results. For example, in the study by Leichtman et al.,
ble 1). A 2 (task order)  2 (task type) between-subjects analysis of children heard misinformation presented by a stuffed animal, whereas
variance on these scores revealed significant main effects of task or- in the present study misinformation was presented by an adult (see
der, F(1, 28)  23.77, p  .001, and task type, F(1, 28)  13.59, p  Lampinen & Smith, 1995, for evidence that young children may be es-
.001, and a significant interaction between task order and task type, pecially vulnerable to suggestion by adults). Another difference is that
F(1, 28)  8.84, p  .01. Leichtman et al. measured suggestibility using forced-choice, non-
To examine the effect of encouraging children to monitor sources, leading questions, whereas the present study measured suggestibility
we compared performance on the suggestion task for children who re- using leading questions (see Ceci & Bruck, 1993, for evidence that
ceived SMA first and those who received SMA second. Children who young children have particular difficulty with leading questions).
were encouraged to monitor sources first performed significantly bet- Why might exposure to a source-monitoring task improve chil-
ter (M  5.50) than children who were not (M  1.38), F(1, 14)  dren’s resistance to suggestion? One possibility is that source monitor-
36.83, p  .001. This suggests that encouraging preschool children to ing reduces suggestibility because it places children’s memory into
monitor sources helps them resist suggestion. In addition, children context. Contextual cues provide effective means of strengthening and
who received SMA scored higher on SMB than children who received reactivating a memory trace (see Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978). A
the detail-monitoring task (Ms  3.88 vs. 2.56), F(1, 30)  7.42, p  related possibility is that source-monitoring tasks reduce suggestibil-
.01 (see Table 1 for group means), suggesting that source monitoring ity by solidifying the original memory trace, so that the discrepancy
can improve with practice (see Roberts, 2000, regarding other evi- between it and the misleading information is easier to detect (see
dence of practice effects in source monitoring in children of this age). Garry, Loftus, & Brown, 1994). Source monitoring may also encour-
Did children who were encouraged to monitor sources and chil- age the use of stricter decision criteria (Johnson et al., 1993). When in-
dren who were encouraged to monitor details perform equally well on dividuals are asked to consider the origin of memories, they engage in
the suggestion task? Children who received SMA first (M  5.50) per- decision-making processes that are effortful and deliberative (Lindsay
formed significantly better on the suggestion task than children who & Johnson, 1989). Children who are asked to identify the origin of
received the detail-monitoring task first (M  2.00), F(1, 14)  24.50, their memories may thus reflect more seriously upon how they know
p  .001. This result supports the conclusion that monitoring sources what they know.
may impart greater resistance to suggestion than monitoring memory Another reason source monitoring may reduce suggestibility is that
details more generally (see Leichtman et al., 2000, for evidence that it emphasizes the representational nature of mind (Welch-Ross et al.,
1997). An important component of children’s developing theory of
mind is the understanding that the mind represents and constructs real-
ity, and that this representation does not always mirror reality (Flavell,
1. This difference in magnitude could be because children in the SMA-first 1988; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Woolley & Bruell, 1996). When
condition had bolstered scores on the suggestion task and SMB, placing them children are asked questions about sources, this might implicitly teach
closer to ceiling. them that there can be multiple sources of knowledge about the same

290 VOL. 13, NO. 3, MAY 2002

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Jessica W. Giles, Alison Gopnik, and Gail D. Heyman

Table 1. Mean performance on the suggestion task and source-monitoring task B, for each
group

Task
Group Suggestion Source monitoring (B)
Source monitoring (A),
monitoring task first 5.50 (0.76) 2.88 (0.64)
Source monitoring (A),
monitoring task second 1.38 (1.77) 4.89 (1.25)
Detail monitoring,
monitoring task first 2.00 (1.85) 3.13 (1.55)
Detail monitoring,
monitoring task second 1.00 (1.31) 2.00 (0.76)
Note. Scores on these tasks had a possible range from 0 to 6. Standard deviations are shown in
parentheses.

event, and consequently lead them to recognize that “assertions gener- Lampinen, J.L., & Smith, V.L. (1995). The incredible (and sometimes incredulous) child
witness: Child eyewitnesses’ sensitivity to source credibility cues. Journal of Ap-
ated by human minds can be differentiated from an external reality plied Psychology, 80, 621–627.
against which they can be compared” (Kuhn & Pearsall, 2000, p. 127). Leichtman, M.D., & Ceci, S.J. (1995). The effects of stereotypes and suggestions on pre-
The present study suggests that preschool children’s suggestibility schoolers’ reports. Developmental Psychology, 31, 568–578.
Leichtman, M.D., Morse, M.B., Dixon, A., & Spiegel, R. (2000). Source monitoring and
is reduced when they are attuned to the epistemic origins of mental suggestibility: An individual differences approach. In K.P. Roberts & M. Blades
representation. These results also suggest that in applied settings, such (Eds.), Children’s source monitoring (pp. 257–287). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
as in preparation for courtroom testimony, encouraging children to fo- Lindsay, D.S., & Johnson, M.K. (1989). The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory
for source. Memory & Cognition, 17, 349–358.
cus on source information may increase the likelihood that they will Multhaup, K.S., De Leonardis, D.M., & Johnson, M.K. (1999). Source memory and eye-
provide valid reports. witness suggestibility in older adults. Journal of General Psychology, 126, 74–84.
O’Neill, D., Astington, J.W., & Flavell, J.H. (1992). Young children’s understanding of the
role that sensory experiences play in knowledge acquisition. Child Development,
Acknowledgments—This research was supported by National Institutes of 63, 474–490.
O’Neill, D., & Gopnik, A. (1991). Young children’s ability to identify the sources of their
Health Grant HD38529 and National Science Foundation Grant DBS9213959.
beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 27, 390–397.
The authors wish to thank Brian Compton, Dacher Keltner, and Gerald Pezdek, K., & Roe, C. (1995). The effect of memory trace strength on suggestibility. Jour-
Mendelsohn for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and the nal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 116–128.
children, parents, and staff at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center in Poole, D.A., & Lindsay, D.S. (2001). Children’s eyewitness reports after exposure to mis-
Berkeley, California. information from parents. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7, 27–50.
Roberts, K.P. (2000). Conclusions: Children’s source monitoring. In K.P. Roberts & M.
Blades (Eds.), Children’s source monitoring (pp. 317–336). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Roberts, K.P., & Blades, M. (1998). The effects of interacting in repeated events on chil-
dren’s eyewitness memory and source monitoring. Applied Cognitive Psychology,
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