Psychology UG and PGT Conversion
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Module Code: PY3FOR
Marker (if known): Dr Kai Li Chung
Assignment title: Critical Review
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In the justice system, investigations of a crime include processes of obtaining
evidence to understand and reveal the incident. One of the evidence that are commonly
sought after and deemed valuable is the testimonies of eyewitnesses. This form of evidence is
deemed valuable because of its presumed credibility, therefore it can be presented and used
regardless of its validity. However, certain groups of people may be deemed unfit to be
eyewitnesses or they are commonly perceived by the court for providing unreliable
testimonies. One such group is comprised of children. The criticism of children being
unreliable eyewitnesses stems from speculations about children being more susceptible to
suggestibility, their underdeveloped memory as well as unrefined perceptual abilities.
However, these claims and research evidence have to be critically discussed as certain
situations may only have children being present around or during the incident, such as
domestic abuse cases.
During interviews with a child eyewitness, the interaction between interviewer and
the eyewitness requires caution during extraction of information. This is because during an
interview, there are possible ways that the interaction may contaminate the testimony given
which may not be what the eyewitness intend to report. One way that can do so is by
presenting suggestive questions or information that can influence, in this case, a child’s recall
and reporting of events (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). In the past, suggestibility was deemed a
significant factor that are relatively more likely to affect children, in turn forming false
memories and recalls. A few reasons explaining this claim is their susceptibility to social
pressure and certain issues with event recall, which opens up the platform for implanting
false memory. Social pressure, such as compliance, have been shown to motivate the false
recall of false experiences in children. Children has been explained to be more likely to be
compliant to suggestive questions posed by interviewers or parents, as compared to other
adults (Ceci & Freidman, 2000). An experiment by Bjorklund and colleagues (2000) looked
into the elicit of social demand characteristics when interviewed twice by the same
interviewer, which thereby intensify the inaccuracy of free recall, particularly when the
participants were asked misleading questions. This study compared 5- and 7-years olds with
adults and found results that opposes to the notion that social demand characteristics,
assumingly elicited when the same person interviewed children, would drive them to repeat
their errors done in the previous interview. Although the results was generated due to the
lesser number of interviews as compared to usual interviews in forensic cases, but it
nonetheless showed support to children being more accurate in free recall and recognition
performance when reinstatements are made. The results from this study can also suggest that
misleading questions may only produce erroneous responses in that instance, but may not be
powerful enough to change a child’s event memory. Contrary to this claim, several studies
have found otherwise that misinformation can cause significant memory distortions. A study
found that with a brief exposure of misinformation, false memory that was generated was
correlated with false memories tested a year and a half later (Zhu et al., 2012). The strengths
of the traces for true and false memories were both similar.
Furthermore, false memories were also explained to be driven by implanted memory
traces, not compliance in children (Otgaar, Verschuere, Meijer, & Oorsouw, 2012). A study
specifically emphasised that false memory can be implanted when narrative containing false,
or even fictitious events, were given (Otgaar et al., 2012). Interestingly, two-thirds among
their 4-years olds sample who developed a false memory remained confident about
experiencing the narrated false event after debriefing. The evidence from their study suggests
that faulty memory traces can be suggested to younger children and produce false memories
that are long-lasting. One of the possible reasons that can explain the proneness of younger
children to be convinced of experiencing false events is their poor working memory (Peters,
Jelicic, Verbeek, & Merckelbach, 2007; Jaschinski & Wentura, 2002). Another important
aspect to note is that the implantation paradigm adopted by that study instructed their
participants to give some thought to the false narratives as well as restraining them from any
external interventions like asking their parents to verify the narratives during the gap period
between the two interviews. The use of this paradigm may then be criticised to exclude
ecological factors that can be investigated to examine their influences on implanted false
memories.
Besides from methods or information presented in interviews which seemingly can
suggest children into false reports or memories, things in society should also be considered as
factors for suggestibility to children. One major influence from everyday life is mass media
that may also suggest information that can distort one’s memory about an event. Otgaar and
colleagues (2009) discovered that after children participants were presented implausible
events in the form of a false newspaper article, the suggestive material was later followed by
participants’ reports of witnessing the false event, noting that the interviewer also included
their parents into the false narratives. It was also found that this effect declines in age. This
study shows the significant strength of prevalent information such as the media in suggesting
false memories. Furthermore, the authors also mentioned that the authority and closeness of
the characters (ie. parents) in the narratives may have acted as a drive for younger children to
believe and report false events. This kind of narratives can be interpreted as children being
more likely to believe in false statements when conveyed by parents. However, this
evaluating point by the authors have been disproved in the context of forensic cases. In cases
where parents are accused of child abuse, Gardner (1994) proposed that custodial parents
have the ability to instil false events into children in order to form testimonies against the
abusive parent. However, strong evidence have shown that children may not be that easily
influenced to lie about events involving aggression (Clemente & Padilla-Racero, 2015;
Clemente, 2013) and there is currently no scientific research that supports the PAS theory
(Blizard & Shaw, 2019). Related to relational factors, 11- and 12-years old children were
demonstrated to be relatively susceptible to peer input of misinformation as compared to
adolescents (Calado, Otgaar & Muris, 2018).
As mentioned before, poor working memory may be the underlying reason for
children to be more susceptible to memory distortions (Peters et al., 2007). It was explained
that working memory processing is positively correlated with episodic encoding and
subsequent retrieval. Reduced working memory processing would also lead to increased
frequencies of misattributing certain aspects within retrieving memory, especially when said
working memory is overloaded during encoding. Source monitoring is a reflective
mechanism that screens for the correct memory information upon retrieval, and its errors are
antecedents for false memory (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Linsay, 1993; Lindsay & Johnson,
2000). The lacking in working memory performance that is attributed to lead to a higher
proneness to false memories is based on the source monitoring framework (SMF; Johnson et
al., 1993; Mitchell & Johnson, 2000). This framework proposed that source monitoring
highly rely on perceptual abilities, as the information generated from the sensory modalities
will be used as sources for memory retrieval (Lindsay & Johnson, 2000). The functional link
between working memory and source monitoring are also supported by neuroimaging
experiments, where there were great activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex during a task
that requires the maintenance of working memory during source judgements (Mitchell,
Johnson, Raye, & Greene, 2004). These evidence can be used to further discuss why young
children’s are prone to memory falsifications. Based on neurological research on the lateral
prefrontal cortex, children between 4 to 7 years of age undergo a gradual maturation of the
said brain area as well as the corresponding working memory (Tsujimoto & Sawaguchi,
2004, as cited in Uytun, 2018) and would only reach full maturation by the age of 11 and 12
(Fuster, 2008, as cited in Uytun, 2018). Nevertheless, inconsistent findings were presented
regarding children's memory recall. A study comparing free recall of eyewitness memory and
autobiographical memory across three age groups (i.e. children, adolescents and adults)
typically found that amount of information reported increases with age (Jack, Leov, & Zajac,
2014). Interestingly, accuracy in both types of memory conditions remained high across the
age groups, suggesting children in being similarly reliable in recalling either types of memory
as compared with other age groups. However, empirical studies that support an otherwise
idea that young children were able to recall distant memories of specific events that they
experienced when they were as young as 3-years old, even after years of delay (Bauer et al.,
2007; Jack, Simcock & Hayne, 2011). The results from these studies challenge the facilitation
of a matured working memory to prevent false memories. From another perspective, these
results may also be due to that younger children may not have a lot of similar sources that can
cause erroneous recollection of information instead of some sort of compensatory
mechanisms that replace working memory abilities.
Based on the SMF, memories are sourced collectively from perceptual, semantic and
affective information that are usually invoked in a subconscious manner (Lindsay & Johnson,
2000). Fundamentally, in order to gain these experiential information to then be used as
building blocks for subsequent memory retrieval, one’s perceptual abilities can be a
determinant for the quality and accuracy of memory recall. This ability is an important aspect
as it can determine the reliability and validity of an eyewitness’ testimony. In forensic
investigations, not only are interviews used to gain testimonies about the incident, but there
are also procedures of identifying a suspect. One of the common procedure is known as a
line-up, where a witness are shown a row of target people which may or may not contain the
suspect. Therefore, in order to identify a suspect accurately, it is crucial to assess eyewitness’
performance in face perception. In neurological studies, one main area that governs face
perception as well as long-term memory is the fusiform face area (FFA; Grill-Spector, Knouf
& Kanwisher, 2004). And indeed, it was found that the FFA was larger in adults as compared
to children (Golarai et al., 2007). Besides, the significantly correlated function of face
recognition accuracy also produced similar increasing age differences, where children are less
accurate. It was also demonstrated that children were not well-versed in domain-specific and
selective activation in FFA, inferring that their reduced accuracy may also be attributed to the
inability in selectively retrieving and recognising specific facial features (Kadosh & Johnson,
2007). Golarai and colleagues (2007) also examined the differences in object recognition.
They instead found that there were equal activation volumes in the lateral occipital complex
across age, and the corresponding task of object recognition showed the same results. This
observation can act as supportive evidence for healthy children’s visual encoding of an
environment, which would not jeopardise subsequent memory of the incident. However, it
was argued that when someone who is perceived as being a threat, preschool-age children
exhibited enhancement in face recognition (Kinzler & Shutts, 2008). Thus, this finding
further suggests that face perception of younger children can be relied on when the suspect is
observed and identified as threatening.
In conclusion, being an eyewitness is faced with various external influences and
individual factors that may affect one’s own reported testimony and even memory. In
particular, when the eyewitness is a child, some influences may produce even stronger
effects. One major cause of forming false testimonies or even implanting false memories in
children is suggestibility. This has been shown that it not only can be done deliberately via
questioning methods during interviews, but any narrative information during the interview
can also produce similar misinformation effects on children. Besides that, external influences
like peer pressure and prevalent information that is out of the control of both the justice
system and the eyewitnesses themselves can also cause false memory recalls. After reviewing
the developmental factors of children, it seems that they can attend line-up procedures to
identify the suspect, given that the suspect has been observed to act out harmful behaviours.
(2008 words)
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