Memory suggestibility and metacognition in child eyewitness testimony: The roles of source monitoring and self-efficacy

Children can easily be made to believe that they have seen or experienced something that they never did. This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect. In this paper I examine the mechanisms underlying the misinformation effect in 6- and 9-year-old children, by investigating the influence of two metacognitive variables, source monitoring and self-efficacy, on child suggestibility (Experiment 1). Several investigations have reported that source monitoring is one factor at play in creating the misinformation effect. As for self-efficacy, this is the first attempt to investigate its relationship with memory suggestibility. It is demonstrated that source monitoring is related to memory suggestibility in younger children, whereas self-efficacy plays a role in suggestibility mainly in older children. This indicates that suggestibility may be due to two different mechanisms at the two ages examined. Experiment 2 was designed to test this age-interactive hypothesis. Results confirmed that the misinformation effect in younger children was mainly due to genuine memory errors, whereas in older children it was mainly due to acceptance of the misleading information.