Dissociated developmental trajectories for conceptual and perceptual sensibility in eyewitness testimony? Valentine Vanootighem*, Hedwige Dehon*, Laurence Taconnat° & Philippe Rémy° CNCC-Département des Sciences Cognitives UMR-CNRS 6215 «Langage, Mémoire et Développement Cognitif» *Université de Liège, Liège, Belgique ° Université François Rabelais, Tours, France Introduction Children seems particularly susceptible to the production of false memories so that for a long time the reliability of their witness ability has been questioned (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Previous research has shown that social factors (such as the use of suggestive questioning, threats or social pressure) and cognitive variables (such as reduced memory capacity, knowledge acquisition, language abilities and reality monitoring abilities) may explain their greater suggestibility (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993; 1999; Bruck & Ceci, 1997). Recently, Holliday & Weekes (2006) found dissociated developmental trajectories for semantic and phonological false memories in the DRM paradigm. That is, very young children were more likely to falsely remember critical lures following the study of phonological associates than following the study of semantic associates. With increasing age, however, a reduction of phonological false memories and an increase in semantic false memories were observed. The aim of the current study was to explore whether these developmental trajectories would also be found in eyewitness ability. More specifically, it was examined whether children of different ages would be differently influenced by the conceptual or perceptual nature of distractors. Method Results Participants Five groups of participants were recruted (n=86): 7 years old (n= 19, 10 Females) 9 years old (n= 20, 10 Females) 11 years old (n= 20, 10 Females) 13 years old (n= 9, 6 Females) Young Adults (from 18 to 25 years old, n = 18, 9 Females) Material and procedure The participants were tested individually. They were presented with a short video (about 6 min) depicting 2 different scripts. Each script contained 16 episodes with separated actors and kitchen sets. Some of the episodes referred to typical cooking and washing activities while others were not. After a few minutes, the participants completed a recognition test. This test comprised 24 pictures: 8 identical 8 conceptually modified (the same actors were in the same kitchen but played another action than the one performed at study) 8 perceptually modified (different actors in a different kitchen played the same action than the one performed at study) The participant were told that some of the pictures were seen in the video and others not. Their task was to tell, for each picture, whether or not it was in the video. FIG 1: Proportion of « old » responses as a function of age and item type. Proportion of OLD responses Age groups did not statistically varied in terms of overall proportion of old responses [F(4,81)= 1,508, p= .21]: 7 years (.32), 9 years (.32), 11 years (.32), 13 years (.32), Adults (.29) There was a main effect of item type [F(2, 162)= 2516, p< .00001] showing that studied items were more often recognized than both kinds of distractors : Correct (.87) > Conceptually modified (.04) = Perceptually modified (.03) The significant Age x Item type interaction [F(2,162)= 4,56, p<.0001] showed that with age correct identification increased and false alarms to both distractors decreased. Interestingly, very young children made more false alarms to conceptually modified lures than to perceptually modified lures. Conclusion Age increased correct recognition of studied scenes in children. Although the overall rates of false alarms were very low, we found an age effect on false recognition of both perceptually and conceptually modified lures. That is, younger children tended to make more false alarms in general than older children and adults. However, we did not find the dissociated developmental trajectories for conceptually and perceptually modified lures. But, we found that very young children made more false alarms to conceptually lures than to perceptually modified lures. This suggest that they were more influenced by the perceptual similarity between target scenes and pictures than by conceptual similarity. References (1) Ceci, S.J., & Bruck, M. (1993). Suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis . Psychological Bulletin, 113, 403-439 (2) Bruck, M., & Ceci, S.J. (1997). The suggestibility of young children. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, 6, 75-79. (3) Ceci, S.J., & Bruck, M. (1999). The suggestibility of children’s memory. Annual Review of psychology, 50, 419-439. (4) Holliday, R.E., & Weekes, B. S. (2006). Dissociated developmental trajectories for semantic and phonological false memories. Memory, 14, 624-636.