Eyewitness memory (child testimony)
[8] The development of the dentate gyrus starts forming at 12 to 15 months in the hippocampus, which is essential for the formation of declarative memory in eyewitness testimony.
[5] After the formation of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, the density of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in eyewitness memory, is peaks in its development during 15 to 24 months, changing until the age of adolescence.
[11] Though the hippocampus may stop maturing at a certain age, behavioural evidence shows that declarative memories are known to develop from childhood up until adulthood.
[9] A study looking at age differences in which children can remember episodic memories (e.g. their first day of school, attending a friend's birthday party), elementary and preschool students were questioned about delay interval in past experiences and found significant differences in what children recall.
[citation needed] Stress also appears to disrupt the function of the hippocampus, as it reduces the likelihood for details to be remembered in a logical sequence.
[citation needed] The temporal lobes are involved in several functions of the body including: hearing, meaning, auditory stimuli, memory, and speech.
The amygdala is located deep within the temporal lobe of the brain and is involved in the acquisition and retrieval of information on highly salient events.
Research studies have found that in normal developing children, the volume of amygdala increases substantially between seven and 18 years of age.
[16] This can play a role in how accurate a child's memory performance is in comparison to an adolescent or an adult's recall of the same crime scene.
The amount of time elapsed from when the child witnessed the scene to when they give their testimony is also a contributing factor to how short term memory influences the accuracy of their recall as an eyewitness.
[17] It was found that a child's short term memory is more susceptible to interference as the amount of time increases between the event and the testimony.
[10] Namely, if children's attentions are disrupted by an object (e.g. a gun) while witnessing a crime, they might be unable to fully encode all of the details, resulting in poor recall of the event later on in life.
The results of a study on rugby players by Hitch and Baddeley showed that trace decay contributes relatively nonsignificant effects on retroactive recall.
When the recently acquired information is phonologically and semantically similar with the known knowledge, the rate of retroactive interference is increased through confusion between the two materials.
[21][22] The encoding process, retrieval traces and contextual cues of the newly learned information play significant roles in impairment.
The schematic knowledge in memory is useful in forming expectations and drawing inferences for understanding, but it is also able to cause distortion and interference when the encoding information is inconsistent with what has been stored.
[23] Due to their young age, children have less personal experience, making them vulnerable to impairments from retroactive interference.
In a study conducted by Goodman, they found that non-abused children were more accurate in answering specific questions and made fewer errors in identifying an unfamiliar person in pictures.
Individual differences in intelligence, based on IQ, have been used to explain variances in memory performance among children giving eyewitness testimonies.
[36] A study examining the extent to which the degree of intellectual disability (mild to moderate) has an effect on the relationship between intelligence and witness memory found that there was no significant difference in same-aged children with mild intellectual disabilities (IQ 55-79) and children with normal intelligence (IQ 80-100).
[37] In general, the judicial system has always been cautious when using children as eyewitnesses resulting in rules that demand all child testimonies be confirmed by designated officials prior to its acceptance as evidence in the court of law.
[41] Basically, individual differences between children of the same age group do not play a significant role in a child's level of suggestibility.
To carry out the experiment, the children's parents were interviewed to find out about both positive and negative events that did indeed occur in the child's life.
To test the child's apparent credibility, the researchers had over 100 professionals in the field of psychology view recordings of the children during their final session recounting both the actual and false memories.
This study provided evidence that children will utilize scripts to make inferences about parts of a story (Erskine, Markham, & Howie, 2001).
Both age groups used significantly more script inferences when they were asked to recall the slide sequence a week later compared to the 90-minute delay.
In addition to the different methods of delivery of the misinformation, Akehurst, Burden, and Buckle wanted to investigate the effects of time delay on the suggestibility of children.
In the written narrative condition, misinformation was introduced, such as mislabeling the color of the woman's coat or mentioning that she was wearing glasses when she was not.
Children are specifically susceptible to social misinformation because they generally believe in the authority of adults simply based on the age difference.
When accomplishing complicated tasks, teenagers are still developing the cognitive skills necessary to efficiently manage multiple pieces of information simultaneously.
