Reliability of Children's Testimony in the Era of Developmental Reversals

Abstract

A hoary assumption of the law is that children are more prone to false-memory reports than adults, and hence, their testimony is less reliable than adults'. Since the 1980s, that assumption has been buttressed by numerous studies that detected declines in false memory between early childhood and young adulthood under controlled conditions. Fuzzy-trace theory predicted reversals of this standard developmental pattern in circumstances that are directly relevant to testimony because they involve using the gist of experience to remember events. That prediction has been investigated during the past decade, and a large number of experiments have been published in which false memories have indeed been found to increase between early childhood and young adulthood. Further, experimentation has tied age increases in false memory to improvements in children's memory for semantic gist. According to current scientific evidence, the principle that children's testimony is necessarily more infected with false memories than adults' and that, other things being equal, juries should regard adult's testimony as necessarily more faithful to actual events is untenable.

Figure 1

Developmental increases in negatively-valenced false memories (high and low arousal) and positively-valenced false memories (high and low arousal) from an experiment reported by Brainerd, Holliday, Reyna, Yang, and Toglia (2010).

Figure 2

Basic types of necessity interactions in semantic take-away studies of developmental reversals. Panel A = manipulations that shrink developmental reversals, Panel B = manipulations that eliminate developmental reversals, and Panel C = manipulations that produce cross overs.

Figure 3

Basic types of necessity interactions in semantic prosthetic studies of developmental reversals. Panel A = manipulations that shrink developmental reversals, and Panel B = manipulations that eliminate developmental reversals.

Figure 4

Effects of gist cuing versus standard presentation on DRM false memory at three age levels. The plotted data are from Lampinen, Leding, Reed, and Odegard (2006).

Figure 5

Effects of story context presentation versus standard presentation on DRM false memory at different age levels. The data in Panel A are from Dewhurst, Pursglove, and Lewis (2007).. The data in Panel B are from Howe and Wilkinson (2011).