ABSTRACT
In June 1989, I attended a conference entitled “The Suggestibility of Children’s Recollections” at Cornell University. The aim of the conference was to explore the question of whether children’s memories of earlier events are acutely sensitive to impairment by later events. More specifically, Are children’s memories of earlier events, in comparison to adults’, inclined to be distorted by later events that conflict with the earlier events? This question had become prominent not through research on memory development, but because of the frequency with which children were being called on to testify in court cases involving allegations of child abuse. Most of the conferees approached things from that perspective, and they were particularly interested in whether false memories that conflict with prior events and produce inaccurate testimony can be retroactively implanted by attorneys, law enforcement personnel, parents, psychotherapists, and social workers.
