Children’s false memory and true disclosure in the face of repeated questions

Discernment of Children's True and False Memory Reports: Police Officers and Laypersons

Adults' ability to accurately evaluate children's statements can have far-reaching consequences within the legal system. This study examined the evaluations of police officers ("experts") and laypersons ("nonexperts") when presented with videotaped interviews of children aged 3 and 5 years who provided either true or false reports or denials. Participants were drawn from several counties in the eastern United States. Children's interview statements fell within four statement types: accurate reports, false reports, accurate denials, and false denials. Both groups of participants displayed overbelief in false denials. Several control variables predicted accuracy, including children's age and children's race. A significant interaction emerged: Experts (vs. nonexperts) had greater odds of being accurate when judging false reports (vs. false denials). These findings highlight the challenges adults face when distinguishing between various types of children's statements. The results have important implications for legal contexts, emphasizing that fact finders need to be mindful of the risks associated with both overaccepting false denials and accepting false reports.

Parent-child attachment security is associated with preschoolers' memory accuracy for emotional life events through sensitive parental reminiscing

There is considerable controversy regarding the accuracy and suggestibility of children's autobiographical memory for emotionally salient life events. Attachment perspectives of autobiographical memory development identify the attachment security of parent-child dyads and parents' emotional support and coherence during reminiscing with their children as critical mechanisms underlying children's memory accuracy and suggestibility. In the current investigation, 72 preschool-aged children (M = 4.01 years, SD = 0.85; 44 female) reminisced with their parents about times they felt happy, sad, scared, and angry. Children were then independently interviewed about these experiences by an unfamiliar researcher using free recall, specific questions (i.e., questions about factual details), and misleading questions (i.e., questions suggesting false details). Parents completed an assessment of their children's attachment security within the parent-child relationship. Results revealed significant indirect effects of parent-child attachment security on children's memory accuracy through parental sensitive guidance during reminiscing when cognitive (i.e., intelligence) and behavioral (i.e., temperament, behavior problems) covariates were statistically controlled. Parent-child attachment security was positively associated with parental sensitive guidance during reminiscing, which, in turn, was positively associated with the accuracy of children's independent reports. The findings support attachment perspectives of autobiographical memory by identifying emotionally sensitive and coherent reminiscing as a parenting behavior that explains in part associations between parent-child attachment security and children's independent memory accuracy for emotional life events.

"I Didn't Do That!" Event Valence and Child Age Influence Adults' Discernment of Preschoolers' True and False Statements

Justice can hinge on adults' abilities to distinguish accurate from inaccurate child testimony. Yet relatively little is known about factors that affect adults' abilities to determine the accuracy of children's eyewitness reports. In this study, adults (N = 108) viewed videoclips of 3- and 5-year-olds answering open-ended and leading questions about positive and negative actually experienced ("true") events or never experienced ("false") events that the children either affirmed or denied. Analyses revealed that adults were more accurate at determining the veracity of negative compared with positive incidents, particularly when children said that they had experienced the event. Moreover, adults' accuracy was at chance for older children's false denials. Psycholegal implications are discussed.

Individual Differences in Children's Suggestibility: An Updated Review

The present review is intended as an overview of our current understanding of how children's individual characteristics, in terms of demographic, cognitive, and psycho-social variables, may influence their susceptibility to suggestion. The goals are to revisit conceptual models of the mechanisms of suggestibility, to provide an updated practical guide for practitioners, and to make recommendations for future research. Results suggest that children with intellectual impairment and those with nascent language skills may be particularly vulnerable to suggestion. Further, memory for separate events, theory of mind, executive function, temperament, and social competence may not be related to suggestibility, whereas additional work is needed to clarify the potential contributions of knowledge, stress, mental health, parental elaborative style, and adverse experiences/maltreatment to children's suggestibility.

Does eyewitness and interviewer gender influence children's reports? An experimental analysis of eyewitness and interviewer gender on children's testimony

This study examines how children's age, gender and interviewer gender affected children's testimony after witnessing a theft. Children (N = 127, age = 6-11 years) witnessed an experimenter (E1) find money, which he/she may/may not have taken. E1 then asked the children to falsely deny that the theft occurred, falsely accuse E1 of taking the money, or tell the truth when interviewed by a second experimenter. Falsely denying or falsely accusing influenced children's forthcomingness and quality of their testimony. When accusing, boys were significantly more willing than girls to disclose about the theft earlier and without being asked directly. When truthfully accusing, children gave lengthier testimony to same-gendered adults. When denying, children were significantly more willing to disclose the theft earlier to male interviewers than to females. As children aged, they were significantly less likely to lie, more likely to disclose earlier when accusing, and give lengthier and more consistent testimony.

How children remember the Strange Situation: The role of attachment

This study tested predictions from Bowlby's attachment theory about children's memory and suggestibility. Young children (3-5years old, N=88; 76% Caucasians) and their parents took part in the Strange Situation Procedure, a moderately distressing event and "gold standard" for assessing children's attachment quality. The children were then interviewed about what occurred during the event. Children's age and attachment security scores positively predicted correct information in free recall and accuracy in answering specific questions. For children with higher (vs. lower) attachment security scores, greater distress observed during the Strange Situation Procedure predicted increased resistance to misleading suggestions. In addition, for children who displayed relatively low distress during the Strange Situation Procedure, significant age differences in memory and suggestibility emerged as expected. However, for children who displayed greater distress during the Strange Situation Procedure, younger and older children's memory performances were equivalent. Findings suggest that attachment theory provides an important framework for understanding facets of memory development with respect to attachment-related information and that distress may alter assumed age patterns in memory development.

Is There Consensus About Children's Memory and Suggestibility?

The modern scientific study of children's eyewitness memory was initially motivated, in important part, by the sensational preschool investigations and prosecutions of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., the McMartin case, the Kelly Michaels case, the Country Walk case). These cases form the centerpiece of Professor Cheit's scholarly book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative. In recent years, researchers have made great strides in helping the legal system tackle some of the complex issues involved in child sexual abuse investigations. While commenting on Professor Cheit's book, we review areas of consensus regarding child forensic interviewing, areas of disconnect between scientific laboratory studies and needs of the legal system, and the potential effects of bias on the scientific enterprise relevant to Professor Cheit's treatise. Although we find that there is consensus in the field regarding a set of general principles, there is often room for disagreement in evaluating a particular case, and there is still much to be learned about how best to interview children when allegations of sexual abuse arise.

Developmental Differences across Middle Childhood in Memory and Suggestibility for Negative and Positive Events

In the present study, we investigated age differences in children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility for negative and positive events that children often experience during middle childhood. We first examined 216 ratings by children aged 8-12 years of the frequency and intensity of personal negative and positive experiences (Study 1). Based on those ratings, videotapes depicting the most frequent and intense negative (an accident) and positive (a family excursion) events were developed. A new sample of 227 children aged 8-12 years was tested for recognition memory of the videotapes using the three-stage post-event misinformation procedure (Study 2). Compared with 8- to 9-year-olds, 10- to 12-year-olds exhibited less memory malleability and less compliance with false information. Age improvements in recognition accuracy were also evident for children who watched the negative event, but not for those who watched the positive event. Compliance predicted misinformation effects, particularly in regard to peripheral details. Thus, using ecologically representative emotional events, age differences in suggestibility and memory accuracy emerged, especially for negative events.Theoretical and forensic implications concerning children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gating Out Misinformation: Can Young Children Follow Instructions to Ignore False Information?

The current study investigated the effects of misinformation on children's memory reports after practice with the logic-of-opposition instruction at time of test. Four- and 6-year-old children participated in a play event in Session 1. During a two-week delay, parents presented their children with either misinformation or correct information about the play event. Prior to a memory interview in Session 2, some misled children were given a developmentally appropriate logic-of-opposition instruction to not report information provided by their parents. Results indicated that children were misled by the incorrect information, but that the logic-of-opposition instruction aided in the children's retrieval of the original memory, particularly for the 6-year-olds. Implications of the results for memory malleability and social demand effects in children are discussed.

Don’t Look at My Answer

Preschoolers’ ability to introspect and make decisions on the basis of these introspections has traditionally been questioned. The present research introduces a novel paradigm to examine the development of the connection between subjective uncertainty about memory and decision making in preschoolers. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds ( N = 81) encoded items presented once or twice. They then completed a forced-choice test, provided confidence judgments for each response, and decided whether to select or exclude answers to be evaluated for the possibility of reward. Four- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, reported lower certainty for incorrect and weaker memories than for correct and stronger memories, and they judiciously excluded their least confident memories, which resulted in accuracy gains for selected memories; these findings highlight age-related improvements in introspection on memory accuracy. Among accurate responses only, even 3-year-olds excluded their least confident answers, which suggests that the connection between uncertainty and decision making precedes the ability to monitor memory accuracy.

High accuracy but low consistency in children's long-term recall of a real-life stressful event

The accuracy and consistency of children's memories of their removals from their biological families by the Child Protective Services (CPS) was investigated. A researcher was present during the removals and documented what happened. A total of 37 maltreated children, aged 3 to 12 years, were interviewed 1 week and 3 months after the removals. The accuracy of the memory reports was high at both time points, but their consistency was fairly low; in all age groups (3-6, 7-10, and 11-12 years), a high percentage of new accurate information was reported during the second interview and a high percentage of the accurate information reported in the first interview was omitted in the second interview. Older children were significantly more consistent in their memory reports than younger children. The results show that low consistency in memory does not imply memory inaccuracy and has implications for the interpretation of successive interviews of children in forensic contexts.

Developmental trends in different types of spontaneous false memories: implications for the legal field

In an emerging area of memory research, it is becoming apparent that one particular type of false memory, called spontaneous false memory, follows a developmental trajectory that is the opposite of what is commonly assumed in false memory research - that is, spontaneous false memories are more likely to occur in adults than in children. The present study focused on developmental trends of different types of spontaneous false memories. Specifically, in the current study, 6-8 year-olds, 10-12 year-olds, and adults were presented with two methods to induce spontaneous false memories: (i) semantically related word lists that are commonly used to evoke spontaneous false memories [i.e, Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm]; and (ii) a video in which related details were not shown but were presented during a recognition task. The results showed that children were more likely to form false memories than adults in the video false memory paradigm, whereas DRM false memories were more evident in adults than in children. Furthermore, we found that on a general level, DRM false memories were positively related to video spontaneous false memories. We explain that stimuli that contain obvious themes attenuate or even reverse developmental trends in spontaneous false memories.

Children's memories of removal: a test of attachment theory

We report a study of parents' attachment orientations and children's autobiographical memory for an experience that according to Bowlby's (1982) attachment theory should be particularly threatening-children's forced separation from their parents. It was hypothesized that individual differences in parents' attachment orientations would be associated with children's distress and memory for this highly traumatic event. Children (n = 28) were observed during forced removal from home or school by Child Protective Services due to allegations of child maltreatment. Children's memory for the removal was tested 1 week later, and biological parents (n = 28) completed an adult attachment measure. Parental attachment anxiety significantly predicted children's distress during less stressful phases of the removal, R(2) = .25, and parents' attachment-related avoidance predicted fewer correct memory reports from the children (i.e., fewer hits to open-ended questions, R(2) = .16, and fewer hits to direct questions, R(2) = .27). The findings indicate that attachment theory provides important guidance for understanding children's autobiographical memory for traumatic events.

Links between attachment and social information processing: examination of intergenerational processes

This chapter describes theory and research on intergenerational connections between parents' attachment and children's social information processing, as well as between parents' social information processing and children's attachment. The chapter begins with a discussion of attachment theorists' early insights into the role that social information processing plays in attachment processes. Next, current theory about the mechanisms through which cross-generational links between attachment and social information processing might emerge is presented. The central proposition is that the quality of attachment and/or the social information processing of the parent contributes to the quality of attachment and/or social information processing in the child, and these links emerge through mediating processes related to social learning, open communication, gate-keeping, emotion regulation, and joint attention. A comprehensive review of the literature is then presented. The chapter ends with the presentation of a current theoretical perspective and suggestions for future empirical and clinical endeavors.

Autobiographical memory development from an attachment perspective: the special role of negative events

The authors propose a novel model of autobiographical memory development that features the fundamental role of attachment orientations and negative life events. In the model, it is proposed that early autobiographical memory derives in part from the need to express and remember negative experiences, a need that has adaptive value, and that attachment orientations create individual differences in children's recollections of negative experiences. Specifically, the role of attachment in the processing of negative information is discussed in regard to the mnemonic stages of encoding, storage, and retrieval. This model sheds light on several areas of contradictory data in the memory development literature, such as concerning earliest memories and children's and adults' memory/suggestibility for stressful events.

Are children's memory illusions created differently from those of adults? Evidence from levels-of-processing and divided attention paradigms

In two experiments, we investigated the robustness and automaticity of adults' and children's generation of false memories by using a levels-of-processing paradigm (Experiment 1) and a divided attention paradigm (Experiment 2). The first experiment revealed that when information was encoded at a shallow level, true recognition rates decreased for all ages. For false recognition, when information was encoded on a shallow level, we found a different pattern for young children compared with that for older children and adults. False recognition rates were related to the overall amount of correctly remembered information for 7-year-olds, whereas no such association was found for the other age groups. In the second experiment, divided attention decreased true recognition for all ages. In contrast, children's (7- and 11-year-olds) false recognition rates were again dependent on the overall amount of correctly remembered information, whereas adults' false recognition was left unaffected. Overall, children's false recognition rates changed when levels of processing or divided attention was manipulated in comparison with adults. Together, these results suggest that there may be both quantitative and qualitative changes in false memory rates with age.

Child maltreatment and memory

Exposure to childhood trauma, especially child maltreatment, has important implications for memory of emotionally distressing experiences. These implications stem from cognitive, socio-emotional, mental health, and neurobiological consequences of maltreatment and can be at least partially explained by current theories concerning the effects of childhood trauma. In this review, two main hypotheses are advanced: (a) Maltreatment in childhood is associated with especially robust memory for emotionally distressing material in many individuals, but (b) maltreatment can impair memory for such material in individuals who defensively avoid it. Support for these hypotheses comes from research on child abuse victims' memory and suggestibility regarding distressing but nonabusive events, memory for child abuse itself, and autobiographical memory. However, more direct investigations are needed to test precisely when and how childhood trauma affects memory for emotionally significant, distressing experiences. Legal implications and future directions are discussed.

Response bias for picture recognition in patients with Alzheimer disease

OBJECTIVE

To investigate whether changing recognition stimuli from words to pictures would alter response bias in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD).

BACKGROUND

Response bias is an important aspect of memory performance in patients with AD, as they show an abnormally liberal response bias compared with healthy older adults. We have previously found that despite changes in discrimination produced by varying the study and test list length, response bias remained remarkably stable in both patients with AD and older adult controls.

METHODS

Patients with mild AD and healthy older adults underwent two separate study-test sessions of pictures and words. For both pictures and words, increasing study-test list lengths were used to determine whether bias changed as a factor of discrimination or task difficulty.

RESULTS

Consistent with apriori hypotheses, healthy older adults showed increased discrimination and shifted to a more liberal response bias for pictures compared with words. In contrast, despite their higher level of discrimination for pictures, patients with AD showed a similar response bias for both pictures and words. Bias was consistent across varying study-test lengths for both groups.

CONCLUSIONS

These results suggest that response bias is a relatively invariant factor of an individual with AD that remains liberal regardless of discrimination or stimulus type.

Repeated Interviews and Children's Memory

A crucial issue in the study of eyewitness memory concerns effects of repeated interviews on children's memory accuracy. There is growing belief that exposure to repeated interviews causes increased errors. In some situations, it may. Yet, several studies reveal increased accuracy with repeated interviewing, even when the interviews include misleading questions. We review repeated-interview research in relation to event veracity, interviewer bias, and delay. We conclude that when and how children are interviewed is at least as important for their accuracy as is how many times they are interviewed.