Children's Eyewitness Testimony Research Articles

Forks in the road, routes chosen, and journeys that beckon: A selective review of scholarship on children's testimony

SummaryIn this brief review, we reflect upon the key contributions of research examining children's eyewitness testimony. Children's testimonial ability became a focus of interest for researchers about 40 years ago in the wake of several high‐profile child abuse cases that prompted questions about children's reliability in the face of problematic interviewing and other suggestive influences. Since that time, scholars have examined children's capacity to provide accurate and detailed descriptions of their experiences and also evaluated the impact of various suggestive techniques. We have learned much about the conditions that are likely to promote reliable testimony from children and, conversely, when we might have cause for concern about the veracity of their reports. We highlight here some methodological and translational issues that have plagued the field and suggest some areas for future research focus.

‘Does the jury really need to hear it all?’: the effect of evidence presentation practice on jury assessment of children's eyewitness testimony

This research provided an analysis of whether the presentation of a rapport stage to ‘jury’ members would influence their assessment of the quality and veracity of the subsequent testimony elicited. Three hundred and twenty-three participants aged between 18 and 78 years took part. Participants read a mock transcript of an investigative interview transcript and then completed a questionnaire with questions designed to test their assessment of the child, the interview, and the likely case progression. The transcript was manipulated so that participants were either presented with the rapport stage in full, or were merely told that the rapport stage had been conducted. There were further manipulations of child age (4 or 6 years) and child gender. There was a single main effect of rapport stage presentation (p<.001). Presentation of the rapport stage led to an enhanced participant assessment of child honesty and understanding, interviewer fairness and professionalism, and the likelihood that the alleged perpetrator would go to court and receive a custodial sentence. The results suggested that the practice of editing children's testimony for presentation in court should be conducted consistently; either all rapport stages should be presented in full (recommended), or all rapport stages should be omitted.

Effect of Socially Encountered Misinformation and Delay on Children's Eyewitness Testimony

This study investigated the impact of different types of post-event misinformation and a 3-month delay on children's suggestibility. Children aged 9–11 years old were interviewed about a witnessed event, on three occasions: immediately after witnessing the event (Baseline), after exposure to misinformation (Time 1) and after a 3-month delay (Time 2). With regard to misinformation, the children were allocated to one of three conditions: exposure to a biased narrative, exposure to a biased confederate, and no exposure to misleading information. Suggestibility was significantly higher when misinformation was introduced socially, by a confederate, than when it was introduced via a written narrative. Suggestibility scores, however, for all the children were significantly lower after a 3-month delay, although those who had been exposed to misinformation were still more suggestible than those in the control group.

Pre-professional mandated reporters' understanding of young children's eyewitness testimony: Implications for training

This study examines the knowledge and understanding of child eyewitness testimony held by 261 graduate and undergraduate students in majors or disciplines that are most commonly associated with careers that will give them mandated reporter status (e.g., Administration of Justice, Special Education). Subjects were asked to rate their beliefs about children's communication, memory, ability to provide accurate descriptions of events and people, interview techniques, and the use of anatomically correct dolls. Results indicated that, overall, the participants' beliefs about interviewing young children and their knowledge of their abilities as witnesses were consistent with the extant scientific literature. However, there was a substantial sub-set of participants who were less accurate in their beliefs and knowledge. Analysis of the relation between educational level and knowledge, showed that educational level per se might be less important than the nature of the educational background itself. The results of this study suggest the need for stronger interdisciplinary curricula regarding children's eyewitness testimony. Training programs for pre-professionals should expand to include communication skills and assessment of maltreatment and associated issues, as well as on-going opportunities to incorporate the material into actual practice with hands-on experiences.

Juror Perceptions of Child Eyewitness Testimony in a Sexual Abuse Trial

ABSTRACT A mock child sexual abuse trial was used to study juror perceptions of child eyewitnesses. The child's age (5, 11, or 16) and level of involvement (victim or bystander) were varied across conditions in order to test their impact on juror perceptions and verdict. Results indicated a significant effect of level of involvement on the verdict; defendants in trials involving a bystander witness received higher guilt ratings than defendants in trials with a victim-witness. In addition, jurors perceived the child's eyewitness testimony to be more believable when the child was younger. Implications for the impact of these findings on real-life child sexual abuse cases are discussed.

A face in the crowd: The influences of familiarity and delay on preschoolers’ recognition

Preschoolers’ abilities to recognize former caregivers were examined. Participants were 35 children from three preschool classes. Caregivers volunteered in the classes over a 7-week period. At an initial assessment, children were asked to select former caregivers from a line-up of five photographs, and to rank-order the caregivers by personal preference. Recognition was assessed again after 3 months. Although older toddlers performed at chance levels, clear age-related increases in recognition performance were observed, with older preschoolers recognizing 86% of the volunteers at time 2. Younger children responded less consistently over time than older children. Preference for individual caregivers affected recognition performance among younger, but not older, preschoolers. Implications for children's eyewitness testimony are considered.

Social antecedents of children's eyewtness testimony a single-subject experimental analysis.

In a laboratory simulation, a single-subject design was used to examine the effects of two types of social influence on children's eyewitness testimony, which has not been the subject of systematic behavioral analyses. This study replicates and extends findings from group-comparison studies, and shows that a topic of pressing social importance is amenable to analysis at the individual level, and therefore, potentially, to a behavioral analysis.

Reality Monitoring of Performed and Imagined Interactive Events: Developmental and Contextual Effects

Age differences in reality monitoring of interactive events were examined among 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults. Participants engaged in some interactions and imagined others. Afterward, they were asked to determine whether each action was performed, imagined, or new. This memory test was repeated 1 week later. The 4-year-olds had more difficulty discriminating imagined actions than the two oldest age groups. Imagined actions were more often confused with performed ones than the reverse, though this bias was significant only for the two younger age groups. Reality monitoring decreased over time, especially for imagined items. Activities in which the participant was the agent of action were discriminated better than those in which someone else was the agent of action. Object use during the activity increased the discrimination of imagined actions, especially after the delay. Similarity among actions had no effect. Implications for child eyewitness testimony are discussed.

Do children try to answer nonsensical questions?

Previous researchers found that young children will try to answer nonsensical questions. In Expt 1, 5‐ to 8‐year‐olds were asked sensible and nonsensical questions. Half of each type were ‘closed’ questions (which required a yes/no response), and half were ‘open’ questions (which could be answered in several ways). Three weeks later the same children were asked to judge if the questions were sensible or silly. Children answered all the sensible questions appropriately, and only attempted to answer a small proportion of the nonsensical open questions. However, they did try to answer three‐quarters of the nonsensical closed questions. Nonetheless, children were nearly always correct in judging which questions were sensible and which were nonsensical. In Expt 1 all the closed nonsensical questions were also ones that required a comparison between two items. In Expt 2 we compared children's responses to nonsensical open and closed questions when half of each type were comparative and half were non‐comparative. Children attempted to answer nonsensical closed questions irrespective of whether or not they included a comparison. However, few children attempted to answer nonsensical open questions. We discuss the implications of these results for questioning children and in the context of children's eyewitness testimony.

Memory suggestibility and metacognition in child eyewitness testimony: The roles of source monitoring and self-efficacy

Children can easily be made to believe that they have seen or experienced something that they never did. This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect. In this paper I examine the mechanisms underlying the misinformation effect in 6- and 9-year-old children, by investigating the influence of two metacognitive variables, source monitoring and self-efficacy, on child suggestibility (Experiment 1). Several investigations have reported that source monitoring is one factor at play in creating the misinformation effect. As for self-efficacy, this is the first attempt to investigate its relationship with memory suggestibility. It is demonstrated that source monitoring is related to memory suggestibility in younger children, whereas self-efficacy plays a role in suggestibility mainly in older children. This indicates that suggestibility may be due to two different mechanisms at the two ages examined. Experiment 2 was designed to test this age-interactive hypothesis. Results confirmed that the misinformation effect in younger children was mainly due to genuine memory errors, whereas in older children it was mainly due to acceptance of the misleading information.

Over a decade of research on children's eyewitness testimony: what have we learned? Where do we go from here?

Over a decade of research on children's eyewitness testimony: what have we learned? Where do we go from here?

Over a decade of research on children's eyewitness testimony: what have we learned? Where do we go from here?

Scientific understanding of children's eyewitness memory has advanced colossally over the last 15 years. After more than a decade of intense research, it is possible to reflect on empirical knowledge gained about memory accuracy and interviewing strategies, and to propose directions for future inquiry. In the present article, past studies of the effects of leading questions, repeated interviews, and interview context are reviewed. The contribution of leading questions to allegations of satanic ritual abuse is addressed, as is the contribution of individual-difference factors, such as abuse history, to memory performance. The dilemma of designing an interview for children which simultaneously reduces both the dangers of false reports and the dangers of lack of disclosure is discussed. It is proposed that interviews should not be judged dichotomously as either leading or non-leading, but rather viewed as falling along a ‘leadingness continuum’. To guide future research, a call is made to integrate complex applied and theoretical issues in the study of child witnesses. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The good, the bad, and the ugly: accuracy, inaccuracy, and elaboration in preschoolers' reports about a past event

This study investigated how suggestions provided to interviewers prior to questioning preschoolers affected children's reports of past events. Children aged 3–5 years (N=20) were exposed to a series of game-like events that varied on a number of dimensions: the events involved being physically touched or not, carrying out unusual or usual actions, and acting or observing another child act. One and two months after the events, every child received two interviews from separate adults who had been briefed with either correct or incorrect information about each event. Results indicated that suggestions to interviewers determined the questions they asked, and that younger children acquiesced more often than older children to questions based on inaccurate information. Children of all ages agreed more readily with questions about unusual than usual actions, and younger children's reports became more inaccurate over time. These trends may have relevance to the accuracy of young children's eyewitness testimony. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The effect of an intervening interview on children's ability to remember one occurrence of a repeated event

The effect of an intervening interview on 4–5‐ and 6–8‐year‐old children's ability to remember an occurrence of a repeated event at six‐weeks' delay was examined. The timing of the interpolated interview and the final test were also systematically examined. Children experienced six occurrences of an event which were highly similar; each occurrence had the same underlying structure but included unpredictable variations in the specific exemplars of items or ‘instantiations’ across the series. All children were required to recall the instantiation of each item that was included in the final occurrence in the series. The results indicated that inclusion of a one‐week interpolated interview enhanced the number of correct instantiations that could be recalled about the occurrence in a six‐week interview compared to when there was no interpolated interview. However, the effect of the interpolated interview on subsequent recall was reduced when the second interview was extended to three months. In fact, the decline in performance of children who were interviewed at a one‐week delay and again at a three‐month delay was such that these children received no more benefit from the initial interview than children who received their first interview at a six‐week delay. Interestingly, the performance of the latter children improved rather than declined in the second interview. The implications of the findings for children's eyewitness testimony are discussed.

Direct and Indirect Measures of Intentional Forgetting in Children and Adults: Evidence for Retrieval Inhibition and Reinstatement

In two experiments children in grades 3 and 4 and college students were given an item-by-item cued intentional forgetting task (i.e., instructions were to remember some words and to forget others), either a direct (cued recall word-stem completion) or an indirect (repetition priming word-stem completion) test of memory for the words, and a final free recall test for both remember- and forget-cued words. In both age groups, direct and indirect assessments produced better memory for remember- than for forget-cued words, even in Experiment 2 where the opportunity to selectively rehearse had been reduced by having subjects count aloud with each cue. These results suggest that retrieval inhibition plays a role in item-cued intentional forgetting, albeit one that is similar across ages. Furthermore, again in both age groups, performance on the word-stem completion tasks was enhanced in comparison with an immediate free-recall group, but only for material thought to be irrelevant (the forget-cued words). The facilitation on the priming tasks, however, did not carry over to a final free-recall task. These results on the effects of an intervening experience are discussed in terms of their implications for children's eyewitness testimony.

Children's Memory of an Occurrence of a Repeated Event: Effects of Age, Repetition, and Retention Interval across Three Question Types

Children's memory of the final occurrence of a repeated event was examined whereby each occurrence had the same underlying structure but included unpredictable variations in the specific instantiations of items across the series. The event was administered by the children's teachers at the kindergarten or school. The effects of repetition (single vs. repeated event), age (4-5 vs. 6-8-year-olds), retention interval (1 week vs. 6 weeks), and the frequency of specific instantiations of items were examined across 3 question types. Repetition increased the number of items recalled on a level that was common to all occurrences in response to general probes and reduced the likelihood that children would report details that did not occur in the event. However, repetition also reduced the number of correct responses about which instantiation was included in the occurrence and decreased the consistency of responses across repeated questioning. Most errors were intrusions of details from other occurrences; usually references to instantiations of items that had occurred frequently throughout the series. The younger children showed a poorer ability to discriminate between the occurrences than the older children, but age differences were less evident at the longer retention interval. The results are discussed in relation to current theories of memory and children's eyewitness testimony.

The effects of repeated questioning on young children's eyewitness testimony

The aim of the present study was to explore the conditions under which repeated questions would influence memory performance. Children of five and seven years of age witnessed a staged event and were then individually interviewed with a free‐recall test and closed and open form questions, some of which were repeated in the interview. Some children were warned that questions might be repeated. The older children were more accurate on both open and closed question forms than the younger children. In both groups recall improved upon second questioning with open questions, whereas accuracy of responses deteriorated somewhat upon repetition of closed questions. On the basis of these data it is concluded that if closed questions are repeated in a witness interview it may lead the witness to assume incorrectly that his or her first response was incorrect; however, the findings support the use of repeated questioning as a probe for more information to open‐ended questions.

Effects of prior knowledge and response bias upon recognition memory for a story: Implications for children's eyewitness testimony

Abstract: The present study was designed to evaluate the integration hypothesis and the response bias hypothesis for explaining the fragility of children's eyewitness memory, by varying the plausibility of postevent information and the strength of response bias in recognition tests. Preschool children were told a story in which a boy named Ken saw a housebreaker stealing various objects and the postevent information was also incorporated into the story. The first recognition test was administered immediately following the presentation of an interpolated story, and the second recognition test was administered 10 weeks later. The results indicated that high‐plausibility objects tended to be recognized as the stolen objects in the second recognition test, and that recognition accuracy was higher for a new‐distractor condition than for a misleading‐distractor condition. These findings were interpreted as suggesting that the memory representation of the story might be changed through the integration processes and/or rendered inaccessible in terms of the response bias.

Helping children to remember: The influence of object cues on children's accounts of a real event.

The authors examined the effects of reinstating objects from an event on 6- and 9-year-old children's reports of the event in which they had either participated or observed. Half of the 95 were interviewed twice, 10 days and 10 weeks after the event (Group 1), and the remaining were interviewed a single time, 10 weeks after (Group 2). Following free recall, prompted recall and direct questions were accompanied by objects from the event and distractors for half the children. The effect of the delay on free recall was ameliorated by the prior interview for older but not younger children. Objects attenuated age differences in prompted recall for participants and enhanced accuracy in response to questions. Objects also led to more errors at the long delay. Analyses based on signal detection theory indicated that both response strategy and memory-related factors contributed to developmental changes in compliance with misleading questions. It is now widely recognized that cannot be categorized as competent or incompetent witnesses on the basis of age alone. Many factors influence children's accounts of events, and an interactional perspective on children's eye witness testimony, according to which the skills demonstrated by the child are jointly determined by the child and the environmental context, is beginning to emerge. Such a perspective highlights the importance of the interviewer's behavior (e.g., Stellar, 1991) which, in turn, points to the need to develop innovative interviewing techniques so that children can be empowered to become their most reliable selves (McGough, 1991, p. 167). In recent studies, a number of procedures designed to improve children's event reports have been examined, including interviewer style (Goodman, Bottoms, Schwartz-Kenney, & Rudy, 1991), preparation and training prior to interviews (Saywitz & Snyder, 1993), procedures from Fisher and Geiselman's (1992) cognitive interview (Memon, Cronin, Eaves, & Bull, 1993; Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992), and the use of nonverbal props (DeLoache, Kolstad, & Anderson, 1991; Goodman & Aman, 1990; Pipe, Gee, & Wilson, 1993). In the present study we ex

The effect of drawing on memory performance in young children.

In Experiment 1, 32 5- to 6-year-old boys and girls participated in a unique event and were interviewed about that event I day later. Half of the children were asked to draw what happened during the event and half were asked to tell what happened. In both conditions, only children's verbal behavior was scored. Children in the draw group were as accurate and reported more information than children in the tell group, especially in response to direct questions. In Experiment 2, 32 5- to 6-year-olds and 32 3- to 4-year-olds participated in the same event used in Experiment I and were interviewed I month later. The 5- to 6-year-olds in the draw group reported more information than the 5- to 6-year-olds in the tell group after the 1-month delay. Drawing did not, however, increase the amount of information reported by 3- to 4-year-olds. These findings have important theoretical implications for memory development and important practical implications for children's eyewitness testimony.