Chapter 18: Evaluating Eyewitness Testimony of Children

The stakes are substantial: failing to credit truthful accounts endangers vulnerable victims, while accepting false memories can result in wrongful convictions. Memory capacity in children develops significantly across early childhood, with recall accuracy and completeness generally improving with age, though the relationship between stress, trauma, and memory performance is more nuanced than initially theorized. Chronic maltreatment can impair hippocampal functioning and trigger emotion-regulation responses such as dissociation that compromise memory reliability, yet post-traumatic stress responses can paradoxically strengthen retention of traumatic details despite occasional source confusion. Parental communication styles substantially influence memory encoding, with elaborative discussion strengthening recall while dismissive or authoritarian approaches weaken it. The chapter explores developmental differences in suggestibility, explaining how younger children rely on fragmented verbatim memory traces that decay rapidly, making them vulnerable to misleading questions and social pressure from interviewers. Paradoxically, repeated interviews without misinformation can consolidate accurate memories rather than contaminate them, and individual differences in intelligence and verbal ability mediate susceptibility to suggestion. Disclosure patterns reveal that abused children frequently delay reporting due to fear of consequences, and their emotional presentation during disclosure often contradicts lay expectations, as calm or neutral demeanor is common rather than acute distress. Facial recognition and lineup identification abilities progress with development, yet children demonstrate the same outgroup bias as adults and heightened vulnerability to false identifications in target-absent lineups. The chapter addresses how courtroom factors, including juror perceptions and the use of accommodations such as closed-circuit testimony, interact with testimony credibility in ways that sometimes conflict with forensic evidence about actual child witness reliability and behavior.