Preschoolers have difficulty distinguishing imagination from reality, particularly if asked about events some time after they occurred, which could have implications for eyewitness testimony, according to research done at Yale.

"Much of the research has found that preschoolers are more suggestible than older children and adults," says Amy Sussman, who conducted the study as a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology. "If they hear about something, they might be confused about whether it really happened or they just heard about it."

Sussman, whose article appears in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, designed the study because of her interest in children's memory at different ages and in different contexts, particularly as it relates to eyewitness testimony.

The research project included preschoolers, second-graders, sixth-graders and adults. The traditional theory is that children experience the greatest changes in distinguishing between reality and imagination at around age 7 or 8 and again at around age 11 or 12, at which time these particular cognitive skills are believed to reach their full development.

The children and adults in the study engaged in some actions and imagined engaging in others. The activities ranged from demonstrating how to do things to touching or dressing up another person. Many of the activities involved physical contact with an adult experimenter and half of them involved the use of various objects, such as a ball or stethoscope.

"I found that preschoolers performed significantly worse than sixth-graders and adults (in distinguishing reality from imagination)," Sussman says. "The reliability of memory depended on the situation. Most importantly, children and adults made more mistakes when judging the source of imagined events than when judging the source of real events -- they had a tendency to believe an imagined action was a real one more often than the reverse. This type of confusion is particularly problematic because it could lead to false accusations."

Furthermore, she adds, "preschoolers' ability to determine that an imagined event was, in fact, only imagined was no better than chance one week after the event. Memory was more accurate if the action involved an object or was performed by the study participant rather than by another person."

"Studies have found that many of the problems with suggestibility are in the way the questions are asked and the frequency with which the questions are repeated," Sussman says. In some of the more publicized cases of alleged child abuse a number of years ago, she contends, the children's reports were probably being influenced through the questions of both the legal investigation and the children's therapists. After a while, Sussman says, it appeared as though the children's stories may have been conforming to the questions.

Although the tasks in this study were physically interactive, she says it is difficult to generalize the results of the study to actual reports of child abuse because there was no physical harm or stress involved.

"The results indicated that developmental differences in reality monitoring occurred primarily for imagined events," Sussman says. "It appears that between the preschool and preadolescent years, a gradual developmental increase takes place in the ability to determine that a memory is based on imagination rather than reality. The fact that sixth-graders did not differ significantly from adults implies that the ability to engage in reality monitoring is fully developed by the age of 11 or 12."

Sussman is currently a research analyst at the American Institute for Research in Washington, D.C.

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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