**2.2. Memory development – Reporting an event**

Having witnessed an event (e.g., a crime), the child witness's next responsibility is to report the relevant facts, as observed. A child's memory report accuracy is therefore dependent on his or her memory retrieval ability and communication/linguistic skills.

**Memory retrieval.** When asked to retrieve a memory (i.e., reconstruct the event from memory storage), children become increasingly able to structure that information into narrative form with age (Lamb et al., 2003). Younger children must often rely on adult assistance, in the form of questions, to provide a narrative account of an event. Older children, on the other hand, are increasingly able to provide a structured, coherent narrative description of their experiences in response to simpler prompts, such as "What happened?". Thus, interviewers (and parents) frequently ask questions that are more supportive, or "leading", with younger children, in part to provide the narrative structure children need to produce a coherent event account (e.g., Dent & Stephenson, 1979; Hudson, 2006; Poole & Lindsay, 1998).

86 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition

Children become more efficient in their ability to abstract event scripts with age. Farrar and Goodman (1992) showed that 4-year-olds did not seem to develop an event script following three repetitions of an event, while 7-year-olds did. More generally, children increasingly connect meaning across different exemplars of a target with age (e.g., apple juice, lemonade, and orange juice are all sweet drinks; Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008). Thus, in some cases, younger children might not yet have the elaborate scripts that older children have developed. This can insulate them from making erroneous assumptions or interpretations

However, despite their efficiency, event scripts can interfere with recall of specific, *individual* instances of an event, such as abuse (Powell & Thomson, 1996). This could be problematic for a testifying child witness asked to describe and differentiate between multiple abuse incidents – perhaps because the defense is seeking to present alibi evidence. If the incidents were so similar that they became script-like for the child, it could be extremely difficult for the child to differentiate the events or to identify a unique incident at a specific date and

**Memory storage.** Children's memory capacity grows with age (Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing 2004), such that they become increasingly able to recall larger amounts of information over time. For child witnesses, this can become visible when they are asked to provide free recall reports in response to open-ended questions, such as "What happened?". Younger children tend to provide very little event detail when asked such questions. Nevertheless, even young children are capable of accurately recalling and

An important moderator of children's ability to store memories is the amount of time between encoding and retrieval. With longer delays, child witnesses have greater difficulty providing complete and accurate memory reports, particularly younger children, as their memory traces seem to decay more rapidly than older children or adults (Brainerd & Rayna, 1995). However, offering children an opportunity to recall an event after a short delay might help to inoculate their reports and maintain them over time (Peterson, Pardy, Tizzard-Drover, & Warren, 2005), particularly when the event context is reinstated during the interview (La Rooy, Pipe, & Murray, 2007). This suggests that the development of children's memory storage facilitates better witness reports with age. It also suggests that there are means of helping even young children to overcome some of their memory shortcomings.

Having witnessed an event (e.g., a crime), the child witness's next responsibility is to report the relevant facts, as observed. A child's memory report accuracy is therefore dependent on

**Memory retrieval.** When asked to retrieve a memory (i.e., reconstruct the event from memory storage), children become increasingly able to structure that information into narrative form with age (Lamb et al., 2003). Younger children must often rely on adult

about events (Brainerd et al., 2008; Lindberg, 1991; Pickel et al., 2008).

time (Roberts & Powell, 2001), potentially undermining their credibility.

reporting their experiences from memory (Goodman, 2006).

**2.2. Memory development – Reporting an event** 

his or her memory retrieval ability and communication/linguistic skills.

However, researchers consistently find that the least directive questions (e.g., free recall) tend to elicit the most accurate information and have the lowest risk of eliciting false information from children. They also elicit less information overall from children (Bjorklund et al., 2000; Poole & Lindsay, 1995). Interview strategies have thus been designed that attempt to provide additional structure and cues to children to maximize the amount of accurate event recall, while minimizing false recall. Techniques include contextreinstatement (La Rooy et al., 2007) and full interviewing protocols such as the Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007) and the NICHD Protocol (Lamb, Orbach, Hershkowitz, Esplin, & Horowitz, 2007). These practices seem to facilitate child witnesses' attempts to reconstruct events from memory.

**Communication and linguistic ability**. A child who cannot communicate effectively in the justice system may lack credibility, leading perhaps to future victimization or to conviction, in the case of a juvenile defendant. Most child victims, for instance, must be able to disclose abuse in order for the abuser to be stopped or prosecuted. However, it seems clear from the number of adults who never reported childhood abuse that this remains a problem for many children (Bottoms, Rudnicki, & Epstein, 2007; London, Bruck, Wright, & Ceci, 2008). Yet, when abuse is suspected, the interview strategies noted above can help children to disclose (Pipe et al., 2007).

Some child witnesses must testify in court, subsequent to a disclosure. This can be traumatic, particularly if it must be repeated (Quas et al., 2005). In many cases, children must first undergo a competency evaluation. These typically attempt to assess their understanding of truths and lies, which emerges in the preschool years and becomes more nuanced with age (Talwar & Crossman, 2012). However, it is likely that competency evaluations underestimate children's understanding of truth/lie concepts and are not likely to be related to a child witness' actual truth-telling (Talwar & Crossman, 2012), raising questions about their usefulness.

When they testify, children are immersed in the linguistically foreign legal system, for which they are often not developmentally prepared (Walker, 1993). They may face the challenge of deciphering legal jargon, as well as linguistically complex questions that they are ill equipped to answer (as are many adults; Carter, Bottoms, & Levine, 1996; Perry et al., 1995). However, this might not undermine children's credibility, as one study of trial transcripts found that complex questions asked by defense attorneys predicted convictions, rather than acquittals in those cases (Evans, Lee, & Lyon, 2009). Nevertheless, children also may be required to offer testimony on concepts that are developmentally beyond their reach. For instance, caution is warranted when asking young children to locate in time or enumerate past events (e.g., age, month, or season; which occurrence, 1st, 2nd, etc.; Friedman, Reese, & Dai, 2011), particularly maltreated children (Wandrey, Lyon, Quas, & Friedman, 2012), as they may struggle to do so accurately until adolescence.

Cognition and the Child Witness 89

details of the events are focused on coping or self-regulation (Vandermass, Hess, & Baker-Ward, 1993) or because cortisol levels produced by stress can affect the hippocampus, which

On the other hand, stress from emotionally salient experiences could lead eyewitnesses to have a stronger memory for a target event (Goodman, Hirschman, Hepps, & Rudy, 1991; Pezdek & Taylor, 2002; Shrimpton, Oates, & Hayes, 1998). Some researchers argue that the stressful nature of traumatic events renders them more personally meaningful and distinctive, which may lead to higher levels of cognitive activation directed toward encoding significant details of the event (Christianson, 1992; Hamann, 2001; Howe, 1997). Indeed, Ochsner, Zaragoza, and Mitchell (1999) found that children who witnessed a staged theft were more accurate on recall and recognition measures compared to children who

Finally, it is possible that stress is related to memory in a curvilinear fashion, with low levels of stress not eliciting enough attention to encode details of an event, but too much stress causing decrements in memory performance. Bahrick, Parker, Fivush and Levitt (1998) found that children exposed to moderate amounts of hurricane damage to their homes recalled more than those with minimal or extensive damage (i.e., low or high stress). However, follow-up interviews showed that the effect did not seem to persist over time

Overall, studies investigating children's memory for stressful events have shown that younger children tend to recall less information and make more mistakes (e.g., Goodman, Quas, Batterman-Faunce, & Riddlesberger, 1994; Goodman, Quas, Batterman-Faunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn, 1997), but individual cognitive factors that affect memory have rarely been examined. However, there may be some cognitive factors that can predict children's memory performance for stressful experiences. For example, Alexander and her colleagues (2002) interviewed 51 children between the ages of 3 and 7 years, two weeks after they received inoculation shots at the doctor's office—an experience that can be very stressful for children. They found that children with better cognitive inhibition ability were less likely to provide incorrect details in free-recall and were less likely to make omission errors when asked misleading questions (e.g., "The nurse didn't give you a shot, did she?") than children with lower cognitive inhibition, controlling for age. Cognitive inhibition, briefly, is the ability to process information while impeding other irrelevant or distracting information or stimuli (Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1994; Lorsbach & Reimer, 1997). Alexander and her colleagues reasoned that children with better inhibitory skills were better able to prevent distractions from impeding encoding during the inoculation, thus allowing for better memory of the event. Further, they also argued that their superior inhibitory skills allowed them to suppress suggestive thoughts, allowing them to better resist suggestive questions. More research needs to be conducted to further probe these results and to explore

**Memory and maltreatment.** Examining the effect of stress on memory is important to the legal arena, but it is particularly important to investigate if these findings generalize to

affects memory retrieval (Quesada et al., 2012).

(Fivush, Sales, Goldberg, Bahrick, & Parker, 2004).

what other cognitive processes affect memory for stressful events.

viewed a similar but neutral event.

Another challenge for all witnesses is cross-examination. Unfortunately, research examining children's performance under cross-examination suggests that they risk losing credibility, despite their cognitive ability to provide accurate information. This is because they often change answers in response to cross-examination – both their correct and their incorrect direct examination answers (Zajac & Hayne, 2003; Zajac, Jury, & O'Neill, 2009). In fact, preschoolers, older children *and* adults are vulnerable to the deleterious impact of crossexamination (Zajac & Hayne, 2006; Zajac & Cannan, 2009) – highlighting the fact that social pressures can undermine accurate memory reporting. Providing support persons for child witnesses and preparation for legal participation are procedures meant to alleviate some of the stresses of testifying for children and seem to offer some benefits (Malloy et al., 2007). Nevertheless, it is clear that the justice system demands a significant degree of communicative and linguistic competency from child witnesses, some of which is beyond their capacities.
