Improving Young Children's Accuracy of Recall for an Eyewitness Event

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 449

Improving Young Children’s Accuracy of Recall for an Eyewitness Event Melissa Nesbitt and Roslyn Markham The University of Sydney

Children as young as 4 years of age sometimes have been required to act as witnesses. These young children have been thought to be too compliant in answering questions, failing to admit that they do not know answers. It has also been suggested that, under certain circumstances, they are poor at distinguishing between memories based on different sources. In the present study, 4-year-old children were trained to say “I don’t know” when uncertain of answers to questions. Trained children were found to be more accurate than untrained, making a reduced number of false-alarm responses. Alerting these children to possible different sources for their memories was also effective in increasing accuracy by reducing number of false alarms. It was concluded that both procedures may be adopted in an attempt to increase the accuracy of testimony given by young children.

Young children increasingly are being asked to give evidence about crimes of which they have either been the victim or that they have observed. In many cases, as with child abuse, the child victim may be the sole witness to the crime in which the child is the victim; in other cases, as in maternal abuse, the child may be the sole eyewitness. Children as young as 3 or 4 years of age may be questioned at length and by numerous people in these abuse cases (Ceci & Bruck, 1993; 1995). Whereas early research was largely concerned with the reliability of reports given by school children, more recently there has been considerable debate about the competence of preschool children to act as witnesses. Young children traditionally have been seen as poor witnesses, unable to distinguish truth from fantasy (e.g., Goodman, Golding, & Helgeson, 1987; Ross, Dunning, Toglia, & Ceci, 1990; Ceci & Bruck, 1995), although this view is not universally accepted (e.g., Leippe & Romanczyk, 1989; Melton, 1992; Saywitz, 1987). One aspect of young children’s testimony that has received a great deal of attention is the proposition that young children are very suggestible. Suggestibility in eyewitness studies usually has been taken to refer to the degree to which the report of an observer changes after an Direct all correspondence to: Roslyn Markham, Department of Psychology, The University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia . Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 20(3): 449–459 Copyright  1999 Elsevier Science Inc. ISSN: 0193-3973 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 449

p91980$$26

450

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 450

NESBITT AND MARKHAM

observed event to include additional, externally provided information that was not present during the original event (Penrod, Bull & Lengnik, 1989). More recently, Ceci and Bruck (1993) have defined suggestibility as the “degree to which children’s encoding, storage, retrieval, and reporting of events can be influenced by a range of social and psychological factors” (p. 404). The latter definition includes a number of important factors, including conscious adoption of divergent statements and the effects of social factors. This broader definition is consistent with its legal use and is the definition adopted here. Although most studies claim to have demonstrated that young children are more suggestible than older children or adults (e.g., Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987; King & Yuille, 1987; Ornstein, Gordon, & Larus, 1992), other results have led to this claim being disputed (e.g., Flin, Boon, Knox, & Bull, 1992; Rudy & Goodman, 1991; Saywitz, Goodman, Nicholas, & Moan, 1991). Ceci and Bruck (1993) have presented a comprehensive historical review of studies investigating this issue. One factor of children’s memory that seems to be consistent across experiments is that children will recall less information spontaneously than adults (e.g., Cole & Loftus, 1987; Loftus & Davies, 1984), although the information recalled is often stated to be as accurate as that of an adult (Cole & Loftus, 1987; Saywitz, 1987). To increase the amount of information obtained from a child, an interviewer may question the child about aspects of an event that s/he failed to describe spontaneously in the free recall report. The less information that is initially given by the child, the greater the number of questions that may be asked to complete a picture of the target event. Further questioning may encourage the child to provide definite answers to questions about which s/he is unsure and may lead to the questioner suggesting to the child the presence of an event or object that was not, in fact, present. King and Yuille (1987) and Parker and Carranza (1989) reported that young children were likely to make a positive identification in a blank lineup and were reluctant to say that they did not know if the target person was present or not. If they were given an identification task to do, they apparently believed they should give a positive response. Children seem to assume that adults present them with recognition tasks and form questions for them in a knowledgeable and logical manner and that a definite response is required by the adult (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992). Hughes and Grieve (1983) found that children attempted to answer an adult’s question even if it was conceptually ill formed. The children appeared actively to attempt to make sense of questions, however bizarre. If young children feel pressured to answer all questions put to them, then it is likely that they will provide an inaccurate account of an event. Young children’s perceptions of the testimony situation has been investigated in studies such as those by Saywitz (1989), who found that young children understood that a witness had to tell the truth, but saw this as being necessary to avoid punishment. There was no understanding that witnesses gave evidence and that it had to be evaluated by the jury, judge, or both. Children of 4 to 7 years of age apparently do not believe that they are giving information to help piece together the events of a crime when they are called on to give evidence. The child must understand that the adult is asking a question because s/he does not know the answer to it; this is an unusual situation for a young child to face. Usually an adult who asks a

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

TRAINING CHILD EYEWITNESSES

p. 451

451

child a question already knows the answer. For example, a parent may point to an object and ask the child what it is, with the child subsequently being told by the parent if the answer was correct or incorrect. In the case of witness testimony, the child may believe that the adult knows the answer and s/he may therefore respond with an answer that is expected to please the adult regardless of whether the child knows the answer to be correct or not. If the child can be taught that an adult desires to hear an “I don’t know” response when s/he is uncertain of an answer to a question, then his/her answers should increase in accuracy. A number of studies have been conducted in which children of from 6 to 11 years of age have been either instructed (Moston, 1987) or trained (e.g., Saywitz et al., 1992; Saywitz, Nathanson, Snyder, & Lamphear, 1993) to respond with “I don’t know” when uncertain of answers to the questions posed by adults. Ceci and Bruck (1993) suggested that “I don’t know” responses may reflect poor comprehension of questions in young children but may indicate resistance to suggestion in older children. Regardless of whether an “I don’t know” answer reflects the same underlying cognitive processes at different ages, accuracy should increase if the child is discouraged from giving a definite, but possibly incorrect, answer to a question. It is important to discover whether children, when given explicit training, are capable of learning to make an “I don’t know” response at an earlier age than they would “normally” make it. Research performed in other areas of cognitive development suggests that explicit training may sometimes accelerate development of cognitive skills that would emerge somewhat later without such training (e.g., Lange, Guttentag, & Nida, 1990). These studies suggest that a child as young as 4 years of age is capable of accelerated learning of simple strategy tasks. A child could not use the “I don’t know” response appropriately, however, unless s/he had some understanding of the concepts of knowing and guessing. Several studies suggest that preschool children understand these concepts (e.g., Johnson & Wellman, 1980; Miscione, Marvin, O’Brien, & Greenberg, 1978). In these studies, a game situation of object location was devised to test the children’s use of these words. It was concluded that there is a developmental trend in their acquisition, with the critical developmental period between 4 to 5 years of age. It thus appears that children of 4 years of age are beginning to understand the meaning of the words guess and know but would not necessarily have incorporated them into their language. It should be possible therefore to train children of this age in the use of the “I don’t know” response to questions. Regardless of whether the child already uses the phrase under certain circumstances, it is important to test whether he or she can be trained to use the “I don’t know” response when they are uncertain of answers to questions posed by adults. Moston (1987), in his study of “I don’t know” responses in 6-, 8-, and 10-year olds, found that simply telling children that they could use this phrase had no effect on the proportion of correct or incorrect responses given compared with children in a control group, although instructed children used the “I don’t know” response more frequently than those who were uninstructed. Results suggesting that there may be beneficial effects in training children to say “I don’t know” in an eyewitness task have been reported by Saywitz et al. for children ranging from 6 to 11 years of age (e.g., Saywitz et al., 1993). Children heard a story about a child who agreed with the suggestions implied by the questions of adults

p91980$$26

452

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 452

NESBITT AND MARKHAM

and the negative effects of this. When training was either individual or in groups, the proportion of incorrect responses to misleading questions was reduced, although there was some overgeneralization of the “I don’t know” response to nonmisleading questions in the individually trained children. This overgeneralization did not occur after group training. There is thus some evidence that by 6 years of age children can be trained successfully in the proper strategic use of a phrase to express their uncertainty and thus to increase their accuracy of responding in an eyewitness task. In the present study, we tested whether it was possible to improve accuracy of answers to questions by encouraging children as young as 4 years of age to respond that they didn’t know when they were uncertain. This was carried out through modelling the desired outcome by using a puppet to play the part of a child. The puppet was reinforced for stating that he didn’t know the answer to questions in those cases in which he was uncertain; the possible negative consequences for other people when incorrect information was given were stressed. Each trained child took part in both group and individual training sessions. A second factor that may be important for the accuracy of the child witness is the way that the questions about the event are posed. Lindsay and Johnson (1989) argued that when adult participants claim that they saw a suggested detail in the original depiction of an event, they may simply be confusing the source of their memories. If a person is alerted to the possibility of information having different sources, they should be less likely to attribute misleading information to the target event source than participants not so alerted. Their results supported this contention. Memory for source by children has been tested in reality-monitoring tasks (in which a distinction must be made between memories for items with external and internal sources) and source-monitoring tasks (in which the distinction is between memories for events that have different external sources). Children of 6 years of age have been shown to have no more difficulty with certain reality-monitoring tasks than adults (Foley, Johnson, & Raye, 1983), although they have more difficulty than older children and adults in some areas of reality and source monitoring (Foley & Johnson, 1985; Foley et al., 1983; Lindsay, Gonzales, & Eso, 1995; Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991; Markham, 1991). Gopnik and Graf (1988) and Wimmer, Hogerfe, & Perner (1988) found that children of 3 and 4 years of age have some difficulty in identifying the source of their knowledge. This seems to indicate that knowledge of source is still developing at this age. It may well be the case that children of about 4 years of age, although still developing source-memory skills, are not spontaneously using the skills they already have. If the 4-year-old child is alerted to the need to monitor source, this would be expected to affect the accuracy of his or her testimony positively, providing that the concept of source memory had developed to some extent. If this skill is still relatively undeveloped, then 4-year-old children should be no more accurate when alerted to the possibility of various sources for their memories than when not alerted. Two procedures were adopted in the present study in an attempt to improve the accuracy of testimony given by young children in an eyewitness task. These were: training in the appropriate use of “I don’t know” statements, which were to be given in answer to questions when the child was uncertain of the answers, and alerting the children to the fact that their memories of incidents may have had a

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

TRAINING CHILD EYEWITNESSES

p. 453

453

number of different sources. The testimony of children of approximately 4 years of age was of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, the increased awareness of crimes against young children in recent years has led to renewed interest in testimony by these children. Second, children of this age have been shown to be capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, but they appear to be unsure of their role in a testimony situation. Finally, it has been suggested that at this age the concepts of guessing and memory for source show important developmental advances. A summary of research by Annon (1987), investigating the question of whether a 4-year-old child could be considered competent as a witness, concluded in the affirmative, provided that the child’s intellectual ability was adequate and that s/he had been properly prepared for the courtroom, with questions asked in an appropriate way. The two procedures we investigated provide important information about factors relevant to both preparation of children of this age for questioning and the way the questions may be posed to increase testimony accuracy. The positive effects of both training in expressions of uncertainty and warning about different sources for memories were expected to be cumulative when warnings and additional training were given shortly before the memory test. METHOD Participants Sixty-four children aged 3 to 5 years of age (mean, 4.5 years) took part in the study. The children were recruited from four preschool centers in the same locality of Sydney. Sixteen children were allocated to each of the four experimental groups. Mean ages for the four groups were: 4 years and 5 months, 4 years and 6 months, 4 years and 7 months, and 4 years and 5 months. Data from one child had to be discarded because of inattention during the experiment. More boys than girls took part in the study, but the proportions of boys to girls were approximately evenly distributed among the four groups. Materials and Procedure Training. Two groups of children (trained) were trained in the use of the expression “I don’t know,” whereas the other two groups (untrained) were given no training, but simply interacted with the experimenter. The children in the trained groups were divided into groups of eight and were told two short adventure stories in which a glove puppet, representing a fox, took part. The puppet was used to focus the children on the central character of the story. This has been found to be an effective procedure (Current, 1985). The stories presented the fox as witness to events that he then reported to the police. The police told him to answer the questions they asked only when he was very sure of the answer and otherwise to say, “I don’t know.” It was explained that giving a wrong answer to a question may put the wrong person in jail and that we should be very careful therefore in what we say. The police reinforced the fox when he stated his uncertainty by telling him that he was good to give an answer only when he was certain. This session lasted

p91980$$26

454

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 454

NESBITT AND MARKHAM

20 minutes, with a short break between the two stories. The experimental task was presented after a short delay. Experimental Task. All groups of children were shown a short video clip from a Shirley Temple film with which no child was familiar. They were divided into groups of eight and were told that they would be asked some questions about the video later. They were then told a version of the story represented in the film. Some of the details from the film were accurately included in the text, some details were omitted, and some details in the story had not been present in the film. Retraining. The children in the trained groups were given additional training in the use of “I don’t know” immediately after the narrative. Training took place in individual sessions and consisted of the experimenter reminding the child of the fox’s adventures and how he was instructed by the police only to give an answer when he was quite certain of it and otherwise to say he did not know. Children in the untrained groups chatted with the experimenter to allow an equal delay to that of the trained children between the experimental task and testing. Testing. Testing immediately followed the retraining session (or the filled delay for children in the untrained conditions). Each child was asked individually to answer 20 questions on the content of the video clip. Half the questions asked about items that had been in the video and thus required a “yes” answer, and half had not and required a “no” answer. Questions followed the same chronological order as in the film and consisted of four interspersed categories: five questions asked about information that had been included in the film only (yes); five asked about information presented in both the film and the orally presented story (yes); five asked about information presented in the oral story only (no); and five were new items (no). The content of the questions covered information about people, objects, and actions. The questions were presented in a format that simply required yes, no, or “I don’t know” answers such as, “Was the princess wearing a crown?” Half the trained and half the untrained participants were then given recognition instructions, whereas the other half received source-monitoring instructions. The instructions differed in important ways. Recognition Group Instructions. Before being questioned, children in “recognition” groups were told that they would be asked questions about the video they had seen. They were informed that they would be given a number of questions and would be asked to state if they had seen items in the video (yes) or not (no) or whether they did not know (I don’t know). There was no clue given to the child that s/he may have been misled by the text that followed the film. As each question was presented, the child was asked to state whether s/he had seen the item in the video or not. Source-Monitoring Group Instructions. Before questioning, children in the “source monitoring” groups were informed that the story they had been told contained many details that were exactly the same as those they had seen. They were warned, however, that some other details in the story were different from what

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 455

TRAINING CHILD EYEWITNESSES

455

Table 1. Means (and Standard Deviations) for Hits, False Alarms, Proportion of Correct Responses, and “I Don’t Know” Responses for Trained and Untrained Children Given Source Monitoring and Recognition Tests Group Trained Source Monitoring Trained Recognition Untrained Source Monitoring Untrained Recognition

Hits 6.37 7.31 7.56 8.41

(2.60) (2.41) (2.59) (1.19)

False Alarms 3.25 4.88 4.69 6.80

(2.24) (2.06) (2.20) (1.37)

Proportion Correct 0.706 0.614 0.645 0.578

(0.16) (0.07) (0.085) (0.077)

“I Don’t Know” Responses 5.50 4.25 0.50 0.87

(3.86) (4.24) (0.96) (1.25)

they had actually seen in the video and that when they answered questions it was important to think about what had really been in the video. (This was illustrated by the use of examples of different items from those included in the experimental questions.) These children thus were alerted to the fact that some information in the narrative was misleading. The children in the source monitoring groups were then asked the 20 questions, with the instruction to state whether the item had appeared in the video (yes), only in the narrative and not in the video (no), in neither the video nor the narrative (no), or whether they did not know (I don’t know). The same experimenter conducted all training sessions. Testing sessions were conducted by different experimenters who did not know the answers to the test questions. RESULTS Answers to questions were scored as hits, correct rejections, false alarms, misses, and “I don’t know” responses. Rudy and Goodman (1991) counted “I don’t know” responses to suggested items as accurate answers. We argue that this is not desirable because “I don’t know” responses cannot be classified as either positive or negative and should be treated as a category separate from both, as in the studies by Moston (1987) and Saywitz et al. (1993). For both recognition and source monitoring tasks, hits were defined as correct identifications of information contained in the video (in video only, or in both video and narrative) and correct rejections as correct identification of information not contained in the video (in narrative only, or new items). False alarms were incorrect positive responses and misses were incorrect negative responses. The proportion of correct responses for each participant was calculated by dividing the number of correct responses by the sum of the number of correct and incorrect responses. This type of score is preferred to d9 signal detection scores, which are more suited to recognition than to recall tests. Means and standard deviations for hits, false alarms, proportions correct, and “I don’t know” responses are presented in Table 1. A series of two-way analyses of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on these scores for the four groups. When the proportions of correct responses were analyzed, it was found that trained participants made a higher proportion of correct responses than untrained(F(1,59) 5 4.63, p , .05) and that the children given a source-monitoring test made a higher proportion of correct responses than those given recognition

p91980$$26

456

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 456

NESBITT AND MARKHAM

tests (F(1,59) 5 7.72, p , .01). The interaction between training and type of test was not significant. An analysis of number of hits found that trained participants made fewer hits than untrained (F(1,59) 5 4.26, p , .05). The type of memory test had no significant effect on the number of hits, and the interaction was not significant. Trained participants made fewer false alarms than untrained (F(1,59) 5 11.50, p , .01), and children given the source-monitoring test made fewer false alarms than those given a recognition test (F(1,59) 5 14.11, p , .001). The interaction between training and type of test was not significant. For the “I don’t know” responses, the effect of training was highly significant (F(1,59) 5 33.20, p , .001), with trained participants giving significantly more “I don’t know” responses than untrained. The number of “I don’t know” responses did not differ significantly as a function of type of memory test, and there was no significant interaction between training and type of memory test. It should be noted that very few “I don’t know” responses were made by untrained children. DISCUSSION The results clearly demonstrated that children of 4 years of age may become more accurate in their responses to questions posed by adults about an eyewitness event if they have previously received training in the importance of saying “I don’t know” when uncertain of a response. Although the number of correct positive responses was reduced after training, the number of false alarms was even more substantially reduced, so that overall accuracy increased. The reduction in false alarms is particularly important for the real-world eyewitness situation, where the negative consequences of falsely recognizing or recalling a person, event, or object may have dire consequences for others. The fact that this benefit was at the cost of fewer correct statements of fact in the present study demonstrates a disadvantage of the training procedure, but this would usually be a cost worth paying. The fact that the number of hits was reduced was not expected but is readily explicable. The children would have been uncertain of some of the previously presented events that required a positive response so would answer “I don’t know” to these after having undergone the training program. Saywitz et al. (1993) found that with somewhat older children, group training prevented the overgeneralization of “I don’t know” responses that had been found after individual training. The fact that the children in the present study had both types of training is unlikely to be relevant to this slight difference in results; it is difficult to see why later individual training would partly negate the effects of earlier group training. Rather, the different results are likely to result from the fact that younger children were tested in our study (although other differences in procedure cannot be ruled out). Additional procedures, such as the cognitive interview (e.g., Saywitz et al., 1992) could be incorporated in future studies with 4-yearold children to examine whether this may help overcome the reduction in number of correct responses for trained children. The low number of “I don’t know” responses made by the untrained children in this study is consistent with results reports by Hughes and Grieve (1983), King and Yuille (1987), and Parker and Carranza (1989), who suggested that young

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

TRAINING CHILD EYEWITNESSES

p. 457

457

children are not likely to respond “I don’t know” in a situation in which they are uncertain. These investigators linked the large number of false alarms given by these children to the unwillingness to make the “I don’t know” response. However, Moston (1987) reported that 6-year olds made quite frequent use of the “I don’t know” category in his study. Thus there seems to be a difference in the degree to which uncertainty is expressed by 4- and 6-year-old children, consistent with the arguments suggested earlier. Focusing children on the source of the information they were to remember also increased the accuracy of the information recalled compared with children who were not cued to monitor source. This result is similar to that found in previous studies with adults (e.g., Lindsay & Johnson, 1989) and demonstrates that although 4-year olds are still developing their ability to monitor source (Wimmer et al., 1988), they nevertheless benefit from being alerted to the possibility that their memories may be based on different sources. The increased accuracy reflected the reduced number of false alarms in source monitoring compared with recognition conditions, rather than any difference in the number of correct positive responses to items that had been seen. Accuracy was greatest for children given training in saying “I don’t know” and also given source-monitoring instructions. Both procedures reduced the number of false positives, with a cumulative effect. These results show the benefits of combining both procedures for improving the accuracy of memory performance by young children in a task in which there may be different sources for their memories. These findings clearly have important implications for procedures adopted in obtaining eyewitness testimony from 4-year olds, although it should be noted that results obtained with short delay intervals may not be exactly the same as those obtained when delays are longer, as in most real-life situations. The present results do, however, show that there are important immediate effects of the two procedures on children’s reporting of events. Before children of this young age are questioned it would seem advisable to give them a short training program in the importance of saying “I don’t know” when they are uncertain of an answer. The procedure adopted in the present study was clearly effective in increasing accuracy. Such a program would usually have to be administered after the child has witnessed the event about which s/he is to be questioned, however. Thus generalization of the effectiveness of the procedure we adopted may be somewhat limited by the fact that, in our study, at least some of the training took place before the event was witnessed. The importance of reducing the number of false-positive responses to questions posed by adults is obvious. Whether the effect of this type of training generalizes to other types of tasks, such as recognition of persons (e.g., a line-up) or to testifying in abuse situations in which the child is the victim, must be tested in further studies. Ethical considerations make experiments on the latter issue difficult to conduct. Our study further suggests that when children are questioned they should be alerted to the possibility that their memories may have different sources. This would apply whether the information to be recalled may be based on different external sources or when some memories may be based on external events and others on thought processes. Alerting children to possible source errors may be very important

p91980$$26

458

09-21-99 08:56:43

p. 458

NESBITT AND MARKHAM

in those situations in which children have been shown to be particularly subject to such errors (e.g., Foley & Johnson, 1985; Foley et al., 1983; Gopnik & Graf, 1988; Lindsay et al., 1991; Lindsay et al., 1995; Markham, 1991; Wimmer et al., 1988). In conclusion, this study demonstrated that real improvements to the accuracy of child eyewitness testimony may be achieved if the relatively simple procedures investigated in this study were adopted when young children are questioned. This in no way suggests that children of this age can be trained to be as competent witnesses as older children or adults, or that additional training procedures would not further increase their accuracy over those demonstrated here. Any procedure that may increase accuracy of reports given by young children, however, should be treated seriously, although the procedures shown to be effective in the present study would need to be demonstrated to be effective with the longer delays characteristic of most real-life situations and the adoption of training procedures following, rather than preceding, the event to be reported. Acknowledgments: We wish to thank the children for their participation in the study and their teachers for their cooperation. We thank Pauline Howie for her comments and suggestions. REFERENCES Annon, J. (1987). The four-year-old child as competent witness. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 5, 17–21. Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). Suggestibility and the child witness: A historical review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 403–439. Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the courtroom. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Ceci, S. J., Ross, D. F., & Toglia, M. P. (1987). Age differences in suggestibility: Narrowing the uncertainties. In S. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Children’s eyewitness memory (pp. 79–91). New York: Springer Verlag. Cole, C. B., & Loftus, E. F. (1987). The memory of children. In M. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Children’s eyewitness memory (pp. 178–208). New York: Springer Verlag. Current, N. (1985). The expansive educational value of puppets. Academic Therapy, 21, 55–60. Flin, R., Boon, J., Knox, A., & Bull, R. (1992). Children’s memories following a five-month delay. British Journal of Psychology, 83, 323–336. Foley, M. A., & Johnson, M. K. (1985). Confusions between memories for performed and imagined actions: A developmental comparison. Child Development, 56, 1145–1155. Foley, M. A., Johnson, M. K., & Raye, C. L. (1983). Age-related changed in confusions between memories for thoughts and memories for speech. Child Development, 54, 51–60. Goodman, G. S., Golding, J. M., & Helgeson, V. S. (1987). When a child takes the stand: Jurors’ perceptions of children’s eyewitness testimony. Law and Human Behavior, 11, 27–40. Gopnik, A., & Graf, P. (1988). Knowing how you know: Young children’s ability to identify and remember the sources of their beliefs. Child Development, 59, 1366–1371. Hughes, M., & Grieve, R. (1983). On asking children bizarre questions. In M. Donaldson, R. Grieve, & C. Pratt (Eds.), Early childhood development and education (pp. 104–114). New York: Blackwell. Johnson, C. N., & Wellman, H. M. (1980). Children’s understanding of mental verbs: Remember, know, and guess. Child Development, 51, 1095–1102. King, M. A., & Yuille, J. (1987). Suggestibility and the child witness. In S. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Children’s eyewitness memory (pp. 24–35). New York: Springer Verlag. Lange, G., Guttentag, R. E., & Nida, R. E. (1990). Relationships between study organisation, retrieval organisation, and general and strategy-specific memory knowledge in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 49, 126–146.

p91980$$26

09-21-99 08:56:43

TRAINING CHILD EYEWITNESSES

p. 459

459

Leippe, M., & Romanczyk, A. (1989). Reactions to child (versus adult) eyewitnesses: The influence of jurors’ preconceptions and witness behavior. Law and Human Behavior, 13, 103–132. Lindsay, D. S., Gonzales, V., & Eso, K. (1995). Aware and unaware uses of memories of postevent suggestions. In M. S. Zaragoza, J. R. Graham, C. Gordon, R. Hirschman, & Y. Ben-Porath (Eds.), Memory and testimony in the child witness (pp. 86–108). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lindsay, S., & Johnson, M. K. (1989). The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory for source. Memory & Cognition, 17, 349–358. Lindsay, S., Johnson, M. K., & Kwon, P. (1991). Developmental changes in memory source monitoring. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 52, 297–318. Loftus, E. F., & Davies, G. M. (1984). Distortions in the memory of children. Journal of Social Issues, 40, 51–67. Markham, R. (1991). Development of reality monitoring for performed and imagined actions. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 72, 1347–1354. Melton, G. (1992). Children as partners for justice: Next steps for developmentalists. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(Serial No. 229), 153–159. Miscione, J. L., Marvin, R. S., O’Brien, R. G., & Greenberg, M. T. (1978). A developmental study of preschool children’s understanding of the words “know” and “guess.” Child Development, 49, 1107–1113. Moston, S. (1987). The suggestibility of children in interview studies. First Language, 7, 67–78. Ornstein, P. A., Gordon, B. N., & Larus, D. (1992). Children’s memory for a personally experienced event: Implications for testimony. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6, 49–60. Parker, J. F., & Carranza, L. E. (1989). Eyewitness testimony of children in target-present and targetabsent lineups. Law and Human Behavior, 13, 133–149. Penrod, S., Bull, M. A., & Lengnik, S. (1989). Children as observers and witnesses. The empirical data. Family Law, 23, 411–431. Ross, D. F., Dunning, D., Toglia, M. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1990). The child in the eyes of the jury: Assessing mock jurors’ perceptions of the child witness. Law and Human Behavior, 14, 5–23. Rudy, L., & Goodman, G. S. (1991). Effects of participation on children’s reports: Implications for children’s testimony. Developmental Psychology, 27, 527–538. Saywitz, K. J. (1987). Children’s testimony: Age-related patterns of memory errors. In S. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Children’s eyewitness memory (pp. 36–52). New York: Springer Verlag. Saywitz, K. J. (1989). Children’s conceptions of the legal system: Court is a place to play basket ball. In S. J. Ceci, D. F. Ross, & M. P. Toglia (Eds.), Perspectives on children’s testimony (pp. 131–157). New York: Springer Verlag. Saywitz, K., Geiselman, R. E., & Bornstein, G. (1992). Effects of cognitive interviewing and practice on children’s recall performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 744–756. Saywitz, K. J., Goodman, G., Nicholas, G., & Moan, S. (1991). Children’s memory for genital exam. Implications for child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59, 682–691. Saywitz, K., Nathanson, R., Snyder, L., & Lamphear, V. (1993). Preparing children for the investigative and judicial process: Improving communication, memory and emotional resiliency. Final report to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (Grant No. 90-CA-1179). Los Angeles: University of California. Wimmer, H., Hogerfe, G. J, & Perner, J. (1988). Children’s understanding of informational access as a source of knowledge. Child Development, 59, 386–396.