CHA PTE R 2 An Overview of Theory and Research on Children’s Source Monitoring
Kim P. Roberts · Psychology Press eBooks · 2000
This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive review of source-monitoring theory; rather, this chapter teases out the main ideas in the source-monitoring framework, with a discussion of fac tors known to have significant effects on the accuracy of children’s source monitoring. All readers are strongly urged to carefully read Johnson and colleagues’ (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) ex cellent overview of the source-monitoring framework. This chapter is split into four parts. In the first section, I clarify the nature of source monitoring and present examples of some of the types o f source dis criminations that children and adults make in their everyday lives. The theoretical underpinnings of this framework are discussed in the second section as I describe how we actually carry out these source discriminations. In the third section, presented is an overview of de- velopmental differences in source monitoring and draw on the early, pioneering studies in this area. Finally, in the final section, significant factors are discussed that impact children’s source monitoring. These factors are grouped into five main areas: characteristics of the sources to be discriminated (similarity, complexity of the sources), character istics of the person (imagery ability, representational understanding, other individual differences), the role of the agent who is carrying out the source distinction (self-generation effect, elaborative processing, the importance of the perspective adopted), interaction with the sources (feedback, employment of cognitive operations, and the goal-related nature of the task), and, finally, the impact of processes carried out at the time of remembering (gist interference, orientation to source). The historical overview summarizes the current state of our knowledge on the development of children’s source monitoring and takes us to the current wave of research reviewed in the following chapters.