Eyewitness identification of children: Effects of absolute judgments, nonverbal response options, and event encoding.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that young witnesses often guess when presented with a target-absent lineup. Three experiments were conducted with kindergarten children (5-year-olds) to investigate this tendency. After viewing a slide show of a staged theft, children were interviewed to assess their memory for the event and asked to identify the perpertrator. Children made false positive identification errors when viewing a target-absent lineup, and many children who initially recognized the perpetrator went on to identify someone else when subsequently shown a target-absent lineup. Neither allowing the children to view the slide show, twice (with instructions to attend to the perpetrator) nor providing them with a nonverbal means of rejecting the lineup increased accuracy. A show-up procedure appeared to facilitate children's identification decisions, but increased the risk of false accusation in the case of errors. The results emphasize the strength of young witnesses' tendency to guess, and point to the role of relative judgments in contributing to children's errors in making identifications.