magazine issue 1 2015 / Issue 24

Children are poor witnesses. Or are they?

• written by Nathalie Brackmann, Henry Otgaar, Melanie Sauerland & Harald Merckelbach
• edited by Jay Wood

Evidence supports this view, with children being less vulnerable to the formation of false memories than adults for meaning-connected experiences (see Otgaar, Howe, Peters, Smeets, & Moritz, 2014). More specifically, studies employing the DRM paradigm have found that younger children exhibit lower recall and recognition rates of the critical, non-presented words than older children (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, & Zember, 2011). Thus, a developmental reversal can be found in spontaneous false memories. As a consequence, it is not likely that in the case that was described in the introduction, the 6-year-old girl produced a spontaneous false memory. 

So, based on the above, we find that suggestion-induced false memories are more likely to occur in children than in adults, whereas spontaneous false memories are more prevalent among adults than children. A series of experiments showed that even suggestion-induced false memories can increase with age (Otgaar, Howe, Smeets, Brackmann, & Fissette, 2014). This developmental reversal in suggestion-induced false memories occurs when participants are misled about related but non-presented details that share the same underlying gist representation. In these experiments, younger children, older children, and adults were presented with a video of a robbery. During the video, several details were presented (e.g., the culprit), but several related details were left out (i.e., a weapon). Then, participants received misinformation about these missing related details. When using this procedure, adults and older children were more likely to retrieve the gist information and to accept the related misinformation than younger children. This shows that even forensically-relevant conditions that originally fuelled the assumption of children being exceptionally susceptible to false memories can lead to significant age increases in false memories.  

Consequences

Whereas early findings suggested that children’s accounts are generally more vulnerable to memory distortions, more recent research predicts that not children but adults are particularly susceptible to forming false memories in highly meaning-connected situations. This new view has been supported by work using the DRM paradigm, showing that adults more often than children report the critical, non-presented words that are related to the presented word list. An age increase in spontaneous false memories has also been demonstrated in more ecologically valid contexts. In eyewitness identification research, for example, younger children were found to be less likely to misidentify an innocent bystander as being the thief than older children (Ross et al., 2006). Furthermore, evidence indicating that adults can have higher false memory rates than children even for false memories induced by suggestion is accumulating (Connolly & Price, 2006; Otgaar, Howe, Smeets, et al., 2014).