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

In contrast to suggestion-induced false memories, spontaneous false memories are more likely to emerge in adults than in children (Brainerd et al., 2008). Theoretically, this developmental pattern has been predicted by an influential memory theory called the Fuzzy-trace Theory (FTT; Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008). FTT postulates that the memory for an event is stored in two traces: (a) the verbatim trace and (b) the gist trace. The verbatim trace captures specific details of an event. When seeing a knife (see Figure 2), the verbatim information would be “silver object with a blade and black handle”. In addition to this, adults automatically extract the gist of an event which includes the underlying meaning of an experience. Consequently, the presence of a weapon is stored as the gist representation. While verbatim information can be assessed as soon as the senses function properly (e.g., seeing), the extraction of gist information relies on knowledge that an individual has accumulated over the years. During development, people augment their knowledge and therefore their performance in gist extraction increases (Reyna & Kiernan, 1994). Astonishingly, this advantage in gist extraction leads to an age increase in false memories. The older children get and the longer the delay between encoding and retrieval is, the more they rely on gist information. If specific verbatim information has to be remembered, it can happen that this information is no longer available. Thus, false memories occur when gist representation leads to erroneous inferences. For example, for the question “How did the thief threaten the victim?” reliance on the gist might lead to the erroneous answer “with a pistol”.

Figure 2. Picture of a knife to illustrate the difference between verbatim and gist information. CCO licence from www.pexels.com.

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).