Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Suggestibility in Children's Eyewitness Memory - Coggle Diagram
Suggestibility in Children's
Eyewitness Memory
Forensic Context
Children are often witnesses in court cases as victims > eg child abuse
Because of the nature of the crime, the child is often one of the only witnesses due to the perpetrator tryithe ng to keep activities a secret
Child witnesses who are not victims
Up to 30% of children may have witnessed something illegal before adolescence.
Are Child Witnesses
Taken Seriously?
no: Cashmore and Bussey- Perceptions of Child Witnesses by Australian Judges/Magistrates
tested ages 4-15. judges and magistrates don't really consider children competent as an eyewitness until around 11 years old.
why?:
beliefs about children's suggestibility > use of leading questions by police officers, unintentionally.
Are children more susceptible
to suggestion than adults?
Methods for study designed for adults:
Step one: Event encoding
Step two: Post-event suggestion
Step three: Memory test
Adapted for children: Ceci, Ross and Toglia (1987)
4 x 2- 4 age groups (3.5, 5, 8 and 11 years old), then control and misled group
Statistically, the size of the suggestibility effect doesn’t change between 5-11 years.
Children are not much more suggestible than adults; people of all ages are susceptible to suggestion in the right conditions.
Mechanisms that produce suggestibility:
Changes to memory for the event
Misleading suggestions post-event can “contaminate” your memory and interfere with your ability to recall the correct details
No way to go back to the uncontaminated memory
Overwriting of original memory
(memory impairment)
Retrieval competition
> original memory is there, but there is a competition between that and the new, contaminated memory trace > brain favours newer memories.
social/demand factors
Memory doesn’t change, but you’re being placed under social pressure and demand by an authority figure (adult experimenter)
Social compliance
Effects of Questioner Authority:
Testing 5 year olds being told suggestions by an adult or an 8 year old, and those being suggested by an 8 year old have a smaller suggestibility effect.
Instead of just changing the age of the questioner, you change the task
Modified recognition test: removing social pressure by removing the suggested idea from questions altogether.
Exposure to suggested detail still affects retrieval of original memory.
Susceptible reports are result of both memory and social/demand processes.
Improving the external
validity of suggestibility research
In real life, children would have to recount information after a long period of time, but that isn’t the case for lab testing
Criticisms of Ceci/Loftus paradigm:
Details that lack personal significance
Low level of emotional involvement/arousal
factors that might enhance eyewitness memory outside the lab
Other contextual issues:
Pre-trial delay
Repeated interviews.
factors that might interfere with eyewitness memory outside the lab
Simulation of “real-life” events
children’s reports of an inoculation (Bruck, Francouer and Ceci 1995)
5-year-old participants
Target event:
Routine medical exam (doctor)
Talk + poster + test (RA)
Oral vaccine + injection (doctor)
Phase 1 suggestions (immediate)
Neural: “lots of kids get needles…”
Hurt: “your shot really seemed to hurt you…”
No hurt: “your shot didn’t seem to hurt you…”
Phase 2 suggestions (approx 1 year later) > 3 interviews over the course of a few weeks
3 follow-up interview sessions
Suggestions about the doctor doing the RA’s job
Suggestions about the RA doing the doctor’s job.
SPLIT INTO 4 GROUPS
No suggestions
Suggestions about doctor only
Suggestions about RA only
Suggestions about both
Phase 3: final memory tests
Overcoming suggestibility
Controversial techniques
Anatomically-detailed dolls
A kind of sociodramatic play, in a sense.
Male and female genitalia
Some evidence of increased disclosure using non-verbal play with dolls
Very sensitive to distortion from suggestive questioning
Concerns about the developmental competence of very young children (2-3 years old) > symbolic thought. Does the child know the doll represents themself?
useful techniques
Cognitive interview
Originally developed by Geiselman, Fisher et al (1984) for use by adult law enforcement officials (LAPD) for adults.
Composed of 4 techniques based upon fundamental principles of memory processing
Context reinstatement: recreating the context can improve memory of details from that context.
Imagine physical context > where the person was in the room, the layout of the room, who was there, what were they doing, etc.
“Report all”: get interviewee to say every single detail they can remember, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
Reverse recall: explain everything that happened, step by step, and then do it again backwards.
Just reporting a memory in forward but not reverse recall suggests that it may be a generic memory.
Perspective talking: take the perspective of someone else present in the situation.
Cognitive interview with children
Not all components are equally useful.
Evaluations of the complete package with adult child (7-12) witnesses have demonstrated an increase of up to 35% in the amount of information accurately recalled.
Which components are most likely to work with young children?
Context reinstatement !! report all works too, but might not add much.
Reverse recall may be too hard.
Perspective taking varies with the age, but the theory of mind issue in very young children might make this too hard.
Hayes and Delamothe
AIMS:
Compare the effectiveness of cognitive interviewing (just context reinstatement and report all), where children (5-7) have or have not been misled about witnessed events.
Similar to Ceci, Ross and Toglia paradigm
4 groups, 4 phases
Control standard, control cognitive, misled standard, misled cognitive
Two CI techniques increased children’s free recall
Exposure to misleading suggestions reduced recall accuracy
The two CI techniques DID NOT reduce children’s susceptibility to misleading suggestions.
ineffective techniques
Hypnosis
The theory is that you’re going to get more correct information by hypnotising the child back to the scene of the crime.
No evidence of increased accuracy in retail
Increase in reports of events (both real and imagined)
More info, not necessarily right information
Increased suggestibility.
Sociodramatic play
Acting out rather than talking about what happened.
Does not increase accuracy, but may be useful for building rapport
May reduce anxiety
Don’t rely too much on this tho, but may be able to start out with it.