**1. Introduction**

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Children's normal cognitive development allows them to thrive and succeed in a wide variety of contexts, particularly those well suited to their emerging abilities. However, there are domains in which children are forced to participate that are not necessarily well adapted to their developing cognitive skills and abilities. One of these is the legal system. Designed to operate with adults in mind, children are often poorly equipped to cope with its demands and rigors (Malloy, Mitchell, Block, Quas, & Goodman, 2007), and their performance in these contexts is often evaluated in ways that might under- or overestimate their contributions (Bottoms, Golding, Stevenson, Wiley, & Yozwiak, 2007). Hence, examining children's cognitive abilities in forensic contexts can be an important means of helping calibrate the usefulness of their contributions.

While the nature of children's participation in the legal system varies, child witnesses must have certain basic cognitive abilities, such as the capacity to perceive, recall and communicate appropriate, relevant information clearly and accurately to provide evidence in legal contexts (Federal Rules of Evidence 601, 602). They must be able to understand and respond to questions effectively, without succumbing to suggestion or interviewer influence, and they must be able to do so credibly, or their evidence might be disregarded, dismissed or otherwise disbelieved (Leippe & Romanczyk, 1989; Ruva & Bryant, 2004). Thus, beyond the cognitive capacity to perceive, recall and report on past events, child witness credibility is an important factor in the extent and type of impact a child witness might have in a given case.

While there are numerous influences on perceptions of child witness credibility, it is likely that their cognitive development impacts both their actual accuracy and perceptions of their

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accuracy and credibility. Yet, this impact likely varies as a function of case content. That is, cognitive maturity might be an important consideration in weighing a child's custody preferences, but be considered less relevant for an alleged sexual abuse victim, for whom perceived trustworthiness is more critical (Crossman, Powell, Principe, & Ceci, 2002; Duggan, Aubrey, Doherty, Isquith, Levine & Scheiner, 1989). To understand the role and impact of child witnesses in the legal system, it is thus important to consider what aspects of cognitive development, if any, are related to child witness accuracy and credibility.

Cognition and the Child Witness 85

**Attention.** One does not necessarily encode into one's memory information that did not receive attention. This is relevant to child witnesses, as children often do not attend to the same aspects of an event as adults (Johnson & Foley, 1984; Mandler, 1990; Yarmey, 1979). This could be protective for children, as recent findings using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM) suggest. The DRM paradigm asks participants to recall lists of semantically related words (e.g., slumber, dream, tired, snooze) from which a critical lure word is missing (e.g., sleep). The procedure tests for false memory of the lure words. Otgaar, Peters and Howe (2012) found that children presented with a divided attention task were *less* likely to have false memories in the DRM paradigm, while adults with divided attention were *more* likely to have false memories. In both groups, however, true memories were not impacted by the attention manipulation. Also, while adults and children might focus on different aspects of a perpetrator's appearance, they nevertheless both seem to be vulnerable to weapon focus effects (Davies, Smith, & Blincoe, 2008). That is, adults and children may focus on a weapon (or other object inconsistent with their expectations) to the detriment of their recall of other aspects of an event that captured less attention (Davies et al., 2008;

**Prior knowledge.** Children's knowledge, which grows with age, impacts the accuracy of their event memory as well. It influences what they attend to, how they understand and interpret events and what they encode into memory (Principe, Ornstein, Baker-Ward, & Gordon, 2000). For example, a child expert in a domain (e.g., chess) can outperform an adult in recalling locations of chess pieces on a chess board (Chi, 1978), and prior expert knowledge can overwhelm the effect of general intellectual aptitude on story recall

On the other hand, children begin to develop awareness of culturally-based stereotypes during the preschool years (e.g., obesity, mental illness, sex, race; Corrigan & Watson, 2007), and these stereotypes can lead children to selectively encode or inaccurately reconstruct their memories to be in line with their stereotypes (Bigler & Liben, 1993; Klaczynski, 2008; Martin & Halverson, 1983). This suggests that child witness memory accuracy could be undermined by children's stereotypes (Leichtman & Ceci, 1995a, b). Overall, then, knowledge can enrich and deepen a child's event recall and understanding, but also

**Memory strength and scripts.** Once encoded, strength of a memory likely influences a child's ability to recall that memory. That is, events that are highly salient or meaningful to a child, or events that are repeated, might be associated with a stronger memory trace. This can protect the memory over time from degradation or other influences, such as suggestion (Christianson, 1992; Hamann, 2001; Holliday, Douglas, & Hayes, 1999; Howe, 1997; Pezdek & Roe, 1995). With sufficient replication, children can develop scripts, or generalized event representations abstracted from repeated instances of an event. For example, a child might develop a script for 'going out to eat' that involves multiple actors (e.g., host/hostess; waiter/waitress) and a particular set of ordered events (e.g., order beverages; read menu; order; eat; pay bill). The same abstraction can occur for abuse events (Roberts & Powell,

Pickel, Narter, Jameson, & Lenhardt, 2008).

(Schneider, Bjorklund, & Maier-Brückner, 1996).

undermine their accuracy.

2001).

In the current chapter, cognitive development is explored as it pertains to children in different forensic contexts. First, aspects of memory development are considered in terms of how they likely impact child witness perception and reporting of events, in addition to factors that might influence witness memory, such as trauma. Then, additional factors related to child witness strengths and vulnerabilities are considered, including intelligence, source monitoring abilities, and suggestibility. Finally, the interplay between case content and cognitive development is explored for its impact on child witness effectiveness. While the central focus of this chapter is on children as victims/witnesses, children also interact in the justice system as suspects and perpetrators. One of the central concerns in those cases is with lie-telling, which is addressed elsewhere in this volume, but here we consider issues such as juvenile confessions in relation to their cognitive development.
