Eyewitness memory and suggestibility in children with mental retardation.

We examined how well children with mental retardation were able to recall a live staged event one day later compared to CA- and MA-comparable peers. Children with mental retardation performed very well on many measures of eyewitness memory performance, reaching the level of the CA-comparable group for free recall, general questions, open-ended questions, and correctly leading questions. They were, however, more suggestible in response to closed misleading questions than were children in the CA-comparable group, although they were not more suggestible than those in the MA-comparable group. Some relationships were found between a standardized measure of suggestibility and performance on the eyewitness memory task, but most of these relationships were not the same within each of our study groups.