The Flexibility of Source-Monitoring Training: Reducing Young Children's Source Confusions

The effect of source-monitoring training on the ability of 3- to 4-year-old children to discriminate between events seen live and those described in a story was examined. All children saw a live presentation of a target event and heard about a similar target event from a storybook. Three to 4 days later, the children received either source-monitoring or control training involving a different set of events. Within each training condition, the children were taught to discriminate events (source training) or identify features of events (control training) acquired from sources that were either analogous (live-story events) or partially analogous (live-video events) to the target-event sources. Immediately after training, all children were asked to monitor the source of the target events seen a few days earlier. The children in both the analogous and partially analogous source-monitoring training groups more accurately distinguished between the target live and story events than did children in the control training groups. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.