Children’s Eyewitness Lineup Accuracy One Year Later: The Role of Social Support and Working Memory Capacity

Abstract

Children’s ability to identify perpetrators who are strangers is crucial. Both failures to identify actual perpetrators and false accusations have serious costs for children’s personal security and wellbeing or for innocent suspects. In the current study, we investigated the accuracy of children’s person identification after a very long delay (one year) and, for the first time, as a function of interviewer-provided socio-emotional support, children’s pre-existing social support reserves, state anxiety, and individual differences in children’s working memory capacity. One year after a play session, 7- to 8-year-old children were asked to identify a stranger from a target-present lineup that included four pictures, a “She’s not here” card, and an “I don’t know” option in the form of a question mark card. Overall, children made few correct identifications, but also few false identifications, preferring to give “I do not know” responses or incorrectly stating the person was not in the lineup. Contrary to predictions, there were no main effects of interviewer-provided social support nor of social support reserves, but as predicted, children with higher working memory capacity performed significantly more accurately than did children with lower working memory capacity, regardless of interview condition. Children’s state anxiety and their confidence in the identification were unrelated to their performance, although interviewer support did decrease state anxiety. Implications of these findings for children’s personal safety are discussed.