Factors Affecting Children Eyewitness Testimony

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Eyewitness testimony is a pertinent part of the criminal justice system when investigating and prosecuting crimes. Eyewitness testimony consists of verbal statements from people regarding what they observed and recall that would be relevant to prove a crime (Wells, 2002). There has been a rising number of instances of wrongful convictions in which mistaken eyewitness testimony is the primary cause, giving rise to the vast amount of literature written on this topic. Recently, there have been increasing events of children being called to take the stands as eyewitnesses to an event.

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The way a child may act in court is dependent on many variables such as stress, method of questioning, and memory impairments due to delay in interviews.

Many might equate a child to be an unreliable eyewitness merely due to their young age, assumed immaturity, and inability to eloquently handle such highly demanding cognitive tasks. However, studies have shown that children cannot be classified as reliable or unreliable witnesses merely based on their age (Goodman & Schwartz- Kenney, 1992).

Cognitive factors such as underlying memory abilities, prior knowledge of the event, as well as biological factors such as stress may impact the outcome. Similarly, factors such as the atmosphere while being interviewed (Saywitz, 1995), method of questioning (Greenstock & Pipe, 1996), and interactions among all other factors determine whether a child will give an accurate account of an event (Bruck & Ceci, 1999). Some of the factors affecting children eyewitness testimony that will be mentioned in this literature review include stress, method of questioning, and memory impairments due to delay in an interview.

Stress

This literature review will cover what is not as widely covered in the existing literature- stress experienced during the time of questioning. There has been a huge controversy within the literature of children’s eyewitness testimony on how stress affects recall performance. When children undergo forensic interviews, it tends to be rather emotional and stressful, especially if the child has suffered from abuse (Hritz, Royer, Helm, Burd, Ojeda, & Ceci, 2015). Children are often in distress during the questioning process as they are away from their parents and face many unfamiliar faces in the courtroom. In some cases, children have been so scared to testify that they refuse to take part in the interview or only agree to take part if accompanied by their parents. The poor recall is hence attributed to the social environment and the stress that accompanies it during the present time of the interview rather than implying an inherent weakness in memory. Due to high-stress levels, emotional contents may be encoded, stored, and retrieved differently, which can lead to extremes of retention or forgetting (Pezdek & Taylor, 2002). High-stress levels are also associated with decrements in memory as cognitive resources put priority on coping and self-regulation at the expense of paying closer attention to the event in detail (Vandermaas, Hess, & Baker-Ward, 1993).

Research has shown that stress is indeed a huge factor in impacting a child’s susceptibility to false suggestions. In one such study, Chae et al. (2014) examined the impact of stress on children by interviewing them about distressing medical visits. Since parenting styles may be related to the stress levels of children, this study has proven that children with avoidant parents, tend to exhibit high distress during the medical visit which in turn leads to an increase in memory inaccuracy. On the other hand, children with less avoidant parents were less prone to inaccurate memory.

There is an apparent contradiction in existing literature regarding whether stress leads to more reliable eyewitness testimony. In the same study, Quas et al. (1999) also found that high levels of stress were related to greater accuracy when asked misleading questions. Stress contributes to a more personally meaningful and distinctive event, thus enhancing memory (Howe, 1997). Furthermore, higher levels of cognitive activation and attention may be directed toward significant details of events because of their emotional quality (Hamann, 2001). Hence, this shows that children experience differing levels of stress during the investigative process and this may differentially impact children’s ability to encode and recall information.

Though children may recall more details about stressful events as compared to non-stressful events, developmental changes in the representation and recall of these events appear similar (Fivush,1998). In addition, some traumatic experiences may be associated with numerous reminders. We know from studies of children (Priestly, Roberts, & Pipe, 1999) that even relatively brief reminders can powerfully affect the accessibility of memories over long time periods. Not surprisingly, in studies showing that traumatic experiences are well recalled over long delays, children were likely to have been exposed to repeated reminders, providing opportunities for reactivation of the memories (Fivush et al. 1998; Peterson & Whalen, 2001). In addition, Peterson and Whalen (2001) suggest that increases in recollection may be attributable to improvements in narrative skill, rehearsal (as a result of repeated interviews), and discussions within the family, leading to more detailed, albeit second-hand, information. Consistent with evidence that repeated recall attempts may lead to improved recall in children (LaRooy, Pipe, & Murray, 2005) this enhancement in recall over time might also reflect greater memory accessibility.

Memory Impairments Due to Delay in an Interview

During the course of a forensic interview, investigators may ask children to disclose sensitive, embarrassing, or potentially uncomfortable information. Thus, these kinds of interviews require a level of openness and honesty from children which may make some witnesses reluctant to participate in the criminal justice process. For instance, children may choose not to disclose maltreatment to a forensic interviewer for a variety of reasons such as fear of retaliation, judgment, and confusion. Indeed, delayed disclosures are common among child sexual abuse victims (Goodman et al., 2003).

These delays in prosecution may result in the decay or distortion of memories. Additionally, omission of details during interviews may lead to future memory impairment given the lack of opportunity for rehearsal. In a study by Peterson & Bell (1996), children were assessed based on remembering injuries and receiving treatment at the hospital. After six months, these children were interviewed again which drew findings that were consistent with Goodman et al. (2003), as the children reported significantly less information about both the injury and the hospital events as compared to when they were interviewed soon after the events (Peterson & Bell, 1996). However, five years after the injury, when these children were interviewed once again, they recalled less about the hospital event than they had soon after the event (Peterson & Whalen, 2001). Nonetheless, accounts from the children of both the injury and hospital events were less accurate after the very long delays than in the initial interview. This suggests that there were indeed changes in the content of memories and that there were memory impairments due to the long delay.

Echoing this, (Hritz, et al. 2015) also noted that the timing of the interview after the original event is highly influential. Studies show that interviews conducted immediately after the incident have a positive impact on a child’s accuracy in eyewitness testimony (Howe, 1991; Lehman et al., 2010; Marche & Howe, 1995). On one hand, the theory of trace strength suggests that long delays between the event and the interview increase the likelihood of suggestibility and may cause important details of the event to be forgotten. Thus, misinformation is more likely to be preserved at the time of the test (Bright-Paul & Jarrold, 2009).

On the other hand, source monitoring theory suggests that shortening interval between event and misinformation increases the likelihood of suggestibility because when the event and the biased interview are close in proximity, there might be confusion between information gained from both events (Bright-Paul & Jarrold, 2009). When trying to recall past events, forgetting is inevitable (Jones & Pipe, 2002). Ornstein and colleagues (1997) showed that even young children recalled a pediatric examination extremely well after delays of up to six weeks (Ornstein, Shapiro, Clubb, Follmer, & Baker-Ward, 1997). Other studies suggest that some traumatic experiences about which children presumably had little prior knowledge may be remembered better over long delays than more mundane or neutral experiences.

Method of Questioning

Cognitive development studies posit that young children encode new information less efficiently than older ones and have a faster rate of forgetting (Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, & Kingma, 1990). Additionally, children of younger ages rely more on external cues when retrieving information from their long-term memory (Schneider & Pressley, 1997). In line with these findings, younger children's initial reports of an event are usually very brief and often attribute information to the wrong source. For example, they might be mistaken about whether they actually observed an event or detail or whether they were just told about it (Johnson & Foley, 1984; Lindsay et al. 1991). It is empirically confirmed that children are more likely than adults to confuse information from similar sources and would therefore be more susceptible to misleading post-event information (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1995).

Repeated Questions

Although neither adults nor children are immune to repeated questioning, children seem to be more affected by this. Children and adults tend to change their answers to differing degrees when asked repeated questions. In a free-response interview, pre-schoolers changed their initial answers in 62.3% of the questions while the second and fourth-graders switched from one answer to another in approximately 47% of the questions. (Cassel et al. 1996). Hence, younger children tend to change their answers more often than older ones (Poole & White, 1993) and may succumb to suggestibility when asked repeated questions, thus providing inaccurate findings.

Misleading Questions

Numerous studies have documented that misleading questions are shown to degrade children’s eyewitness testimony and hence have a substantial impact on the occurrence of false reports. For instance, Greenstock & Pipe (1996) found an interaction between the wording of the question (simply misleading versus strongly misleading) and age. While 8-10-year-old children were equally suggestible answering both misleading and strongly misleading questions correctly, five to seven-year-old children suffered much more from the wording of the stronger leading questions. Studies addressing the question of how credible children perceive their interviewers consistently found that children discern adults as truthful, believable, and not deceptive (Ackerman, 1981) and therefore, accept a suggestion made by an adult with more ease (Ceci et al., 1987). Children seem to have greater difficulties in carefully considering the impact of the social situation during the interview, the information given through the misleading questions, and their own memory of the event in question. In principle, misleading questions can influence event reports in two different ways. On the one hand, witnesses can follow the lead at the time when the misleading question is asked, that is, comply with the interviewer's opinion expressed by the question and perceived by the witness. On the other, children and adults can incorporate the suggested misinformation into their later event reports, that is, falsely choose the prior given misleading post-event information in a later recognition test. This is demonstrated when children are asked open-ended questions after suggestive interviewing has occurred. In one study in which children were asked to give a free recall of everything, they remembered about an event after being given misleading information about the event by their parents, 21% of statements made by children contained suggested false information (Poole & Lindsay, 2001).

Discussion

Although eyewitness testimony is a pertinent issue given its highly persuasive and suggestible nature, there are some limitations and substantial gaps in the existing literature. Limited articles were discussing which the most important factor of children eyewitness testimony was. It is important to know which factor impacts the reliability of testimonies the greatest so more resources can be channeled to curb these problems in future interviews. In addition, there should be more resources dedicated to interviewing children specifically. For example, as stress impacts a child to a great extent, there might be some ways to lower a child’s stress levels during an interview.

In the studies considering a delay of the forensic interview, there is limited information on the actual relationship of time passed and memory. Although it was discovered that there are pros for both early and delayed interviews, temporal distinctiveness theory suggests otherwise. It is harder to distinguish between 21 and 24 months as compared to one and four months, although both cases differ by three months. Temporal distinctiveness theory suggests that it is the ratio of the time between the experienced event and subsequent exposure to misinformation to the time between exposure to misinformation and the test of the experienced memory that is important. This is because as the latter increases, the former becomes relatively less distinguishable. There has also been limited literature considering race and socioeconomic status as an influence on suggestibility and occurrences of false memories of the eyewitness. Future studies might reveal a correlation between socioeconomic backgrounds and a child’s language and intellectual abilities.

Conclusion

As illustrated by the research discussed in this paper, the time is ripe to stop portraying children as unreliable eyewitnesses just based on their age. It is of utmost importance that interviews are carefully considered during a trial. The quality and quantity of information that children report depending on several factors surrounding the alleged incidents such as those mentioned in this literature review- stress experienced during the interview, method of questioning, as well as memory impairments due to delay in prosecution.

It was found that stress may have both a positive and negative impact on eyewitness testimony. Repeated questioning and misleading questions may also cause a child to succumb to suggestibility. Lastly, the amount of time between the incident and the eyewitness interview may also have a salient impact on the accuracy and reliability of children's eyewitness testimony.