When children are asked to testify in a court of law, they are often expected to recount an event or a series of events that they have witnessed. Research suggests that child witnesses perform as well as adult witnesses when the questions are designed to promote free recall, but that children are significantly more likely to change their testimony when asked leading questions. Leading questions are those which include a suggested answer, such as "The boy had on red shoes, didn't he?" This study investigated whether children who monitor and can identify the sources of their knowledge will be less susceptible to the effects of leading questions.

To test our hypothesis, we gave a memory task to 32 three- to five-year-old children from the Child Study Center in Berkeley. The memory task consisted of showing children a one minute video clip (without sound) of a small child measuring a cup of kibble into a dog dish, and giving it to his dog. During the video, the researcher read a narration containing information not available from the video, such as the dog's name, and where the dog dish came from. After the video and narration, children were asked a set of questions concerning information contained either in the video or in the experimenter's narration. Half of the questions encouraged free recall, and half of the questions were leading questions. In addition, children were asked if they had heard the information (from the narration) or if they had seen the information (in the video). In addition, half of the children were told to pay attention to whether they heard something or whether they saw it. The other half of the children were told only to pay attention to the information they heard and saw.

We found that children who were able to monitor sources of knowledge were more likely to be able to resist leading questions than were children who were not able to recall whether they had heard or seen a specific piece of information. In addition, the children who were told to attend to the sources of their knowledge were significantly more resistant to leading questions than were children who were told only to pay attention to the information. These findings seem to suggest that in order to ensure resistance to suggestion, whether in or out of the courtroom, children should be taught to identify the sources of their knowledge.