Abstract
A child who alleges that they have been the victim of a crime will be interviewed by police officers. During a police interview it is important that the interviewer obtains the most accurate testimony possible from the child. Previous studies have shown that if children have their eyes closed during an interview they sometimes report more correct information. This paper includes two studies. In Experiment 1 156 children experienced an event and were then questioned about it. Half the children answered with their eyes open and half with their eyes closed. The participants with eyes closed provided more correct information. In Experiment 2 152 children answered questions in different conditions including eyes open and eyes closed conditions. In contrast to Experiment 1 there was no beneficial effect for the eyes closed condition. These inconsistent results are discussed with reference to actual police interviews. It is suggested that until there has been more research into eyes closed procedures caution should be taken in recommending such procedures for police interviews with children.
Highlights
Children may be interviewed in many contexts and a important one is when they are interviewed as part of a forensic investigation
For specific questions children answered more visual questions correctly when they had their eyes closed, both immediately and after the delay, and the increase in the number of specific visual questions answered correctly was small in this experiment, the same effect could be important in an actual interview when children are asked much larger numbers of questions
Adults generally perform better in free recall in eyes closed conditions (Perfect et al, 2008, Experiments 3 and 5; Vredeveldt and Penrod, 2012), but as yet the limited evidence from studies with children does not show a consistent benefit of eye closure in free recall
Summary
Children may be interviewed in many contexts and a important one is when they are interviewed as part of a forensic investigation. Several questioning techniques have been developed for forensic interviewing These include the Cognitive Interview (Fisher and Geiselman, 1992); Achieving Best Evidence (ABE) (Ministry of Justice, 2011); the P.E.A.C.E. The procedures may not always be fully implemented by interviewers (Hershkowitz et al, 2005; Westcott and Kynan, 2006) and there is still a need to consider interview techniques that can be used with children. This has led to research into the effectiveness of eyes closed procedures
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