In The Accuracy of Mother Memories of Conversations With Their Preschool Children, Maggie Bruck, Stephen Ceci and Emmett Francoeur examine the specific elements of mothers memories when interacting with their children. Twenty four mothers with young children from the ages of three to five were picked for this study. Most of the children were from middle class families. The mothers were all told that the experiment was about their interactions with their children. Then the women were put into two randomly selected groups; one group was told that the experiment was also a study on their memory, and they would be quizzed about their interactions with their children in the next few days. The other group of women were told no other additional information other then they would be contacted about the study within a few days.
Once the children were settled, the mothers left the room. During a scheduled play time (for about twenty minutes), the children participated in various activities such as coloring, singing, playing with Play-doh, and then a staged surprising event took place. A man climbed in the window, looking for his firemans hat. When found, he accused the assistant of using his favorite crayon. The assistant convinced the man to let them (assistant and child) use it until they were done playing. He agreed, blew the child a kiss, and left the room.
The purpose was to give the child a specific unusual experience to report back to the mother. The mothers waited in a separate room, and were given instructions. They were supposed to ask their children specific questions to try to learn about the various activities they did during the twenty minutes. In order to help, the mothers were given a list of six activities, in which only two actually happened. They were also told that an unusual event took place, and they were to try to find out what happened. If the mother could not illicit the story of the man, a firemans hat was brought in to prompt the childs memory.
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In the interviews, 18 out of the 24 mothers had to not only verbally prompt the children about the unusual man, but also required the firemans hat as a visual prompt. Their interactions were video taped and later transcribed immediately following the play session. Three or four days later, assistants were sent to interview the mothers. They could either be interviewed in their home or back at the lab. The mothers were given twenty passages selected from their transcribed conversations and asked to edit them. Then, all the mothers were told this was a memory test, and that they were to try to remember the conversations between her the child as accurately as possible. The sections were altered by researchers in one the three ways: the same meaning (gist) was there, but the structure was wrong; the meaning and the structure were wrong; or the passage was left verbatim as it occurred. The mother was to edit the passages with a pen to think out loud as she edited.
Overall, mothers were able to recall utterances of the conversation in fairly accurate, in terms of both the gist and structure, but recall of the gist was more accurate. Gist was remembered with 88% accuracy, and the verbatim structure was remembered with about 78% accuracy. Telling the mothers in advance that this was a memory experiment seemed to have no effect on their abilities. Mothers could remember between 5% and 66% of the details from their conversations at the lab with their children. Surprisingly, only 50% of the women could remember their childrens description of the unusual event involving the firemans hat. In regards to the altered passages, mothers were very poor at detecting alterations to the verbatim structure of the conversations.
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They usually could not tell if the childrens comments were spontaneous or if they were prompted. Mothers were significantly better at detecting passages were the meaning (emphasis mine) had been changed. They found gist errors 48% of the time, and structure errors only 25% of the time. There could be two reasons for the outcomes concerning mothers poor abilities to fix the altered passages. One theory is that once a mother discovers the gist of the conversation, verbatim information disappears from memory. The other theory is that verbatim information is remembered when high interaction value instances occur (like joking).
It may be argued that the verbatim results were poor because few passages contained this high interaction value.
The results do raise concerns about hearsay testimony in court cases with children. Adults have been able to testify on behalf on children in molestation and other abuse cases. Primarily, adults do not remember all of the conversations with children. Important details may be omitted when they might seem trivial at the time. Also, the adults seem to have difficulty remembering if the utterances were their own or the childs, or how the information was structures in the conversation. If probed about these missing details, adults may not be able to accurately provide the crucial information.
Though the encoding and storage process of the memory process by the mothers is probably unconscious, the retrieval had to be conscious. Therefore, as defined, the encoding and storage were automatic processes while the retrieval was an effortful process. Retrieval failure then took place when the women could not remember the exact pieces of the conversation.
Bibliography:
http://www.apa.org The American Psychology Association Home Page Journal section; Journal of experimental psychology: Applied The Accuracy of Mothers Memories of Conversations with Their Preschool Children Maggie Bruck, Stephen J. Ceci, Emmett Francoeur March 1999 Vol. 5, No.
1, Pgs. 89-106.
