Can private reports enhance children’s event recall, lower their suggestibility and foster their metacognitive monitoring compared to face-to-face interviews?

In this paper, two studies are presented in which the social demands of an event recall interview situation were manipulated using two different methodologies and by using different dependent measures as indices for children’s event memory, suggestibility and metacognitive monitoring processes. Participants aged 6–10 years were shown a brief video and then questioned about it 2–3 weeks later. Answers to the recall questions were either given privately by whispering into a teddy bear’s ear or publicly in a normal face-to-face interview. Confidence judgments as indicators for metacognitive monitoring were entered into a computer, either with the interviewer having direct knowledge about them, or with the children entering the confidence judgments in privacy. In line with previous research on this topic, although private reports did not produce poorer performance, neither did they improve performance. In both studies there were no effects of the social manipulations on either recall or metacognitive monitoring and also no age-dependent benefits. The results are discussed in terms of the chosen methodologies and in the light of previous studies.