Memory and child witnesses

What are 3 elements that make working with child witnesses very difficult?

Poor linguistic skills, Poor memory and high susceptibility to post event contamination

What are four factors that can influence the development of memory

knowledge, mnemonic strategies, meta-memory and culture/social norms

What is the progression for strategy development in memory consolidation?

Rehearsal, organisation and mnemonic

At what age do you see the first precursors to rehearsal?

3 Years

At what age do you see genuine use of rehearsal strategies?

5-6 years

At what age do you begin to see the organisation and chunking of information in the memory?

8 years

What age are children when the begin to use elaboration techniques?

10 years

What is the term given for the self awareness of one’s memory ability?

Meta-memory

At what age do we begin to see children predict their own memory ability?

3 years

What age can children understand that people can have false memories?

6 years

What is the term given to cultures that place more emphasis on memories about others and the group opposed to more self specific and emotive memories?

Collectivist cultures

How do collectivist cultures process episodic and autobiographical memories?

They tend to chunk stories into larger units

What is difference between children and adults when it comes to encoding and retrieving event memory?

Adults tend to focus on goals in the event and children tend to focus on objects.

Even though children as young as 2 years are able to recall memory form years ago, what makes questioning infants about the past so difficult?

Susceptible to leading questions, can be influenced to say anything

What can be some reasons for children unintentionally giving false accounts

urge to comply with line of questioning, quality of memories and linguistic barriers

What reasons did Williams et al. (2013) find for children intentionally deceiving a questioner?

Avoid punishment, sustain a game, keep a promise and avoid embarrasment

What are 3 behaviors that risk altering memories unconsciously?

suggestions, stereotypes and expectations

What are 2 behaviors that risk altering memories consciously?

bribes and threats

What are some cognitive factors that can risk altering memories in children?

Memory strength, source monitoring and scripts

True or false: older children are more susceptible to cognitive memory alterations due to having more knowledge schemas?

True

What are some social factors that can cause for children to give false memory accounts during questioning?

Language used by questioner, linguistic skills of child, pragmatic skills and coercive questions

What method can be implemented if an infant appears to comply with information from the questioner face-face?

Use of video link

True or false: younger children are more suggestible?

true

What method can prevent coercive suggestibility and push appropriate pragmatic communication between questioner and child?

rapport building