Children's and adults' realism in their event-recall confidence in responses to free recall and focused questions

Carl Martin Allwood, Åse Helene Innes-Ker, Jessica Holmgren, Gunilla Fredin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Two experiments examined the realism in the confidence of 8-9-year-olds, 12-13-year-olds and adults in their free recall and answers to focused questions after viewing a short video clip. A different video clip was shown in each experiment and the focused questions differed in difficulty. In both experiments the youngest age group, in contrast to the two other age groups, showed no overconfidence in their confidence judgements for the free recall. The free recall results also showed that the youngest group had lower completeness but similar correctness as the adults. There was a tendency, over both experiments, for the participants to show poorer realism for the focused questions than for the free recall, especially when questions with content already mentioned in the free recall were excluded from the analyses of the focused questions in Experiment 1. The study shows the importance of question format when evaluating the credibility of the confidence shown by 8-9-year-old children in their own testimony.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)529-547
Number of pages18
JournalPsychology, Crime and Law
Volume14
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes

Swedish Standard Keywords

  • Psychology (501)
  • Social Sciences (5)

Keywords

  • age
  • calibration
  • confidence
  • event memory
  • eyewitnesses
  • focused questions
  • free recall

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