Children lack appropriate schemas which
may contribute to their inaccurate recall of
events
CONCLUSIONS
Younger children are more suggestible
than older children (and so adults)
Leading questions and misleading interview
techniques may result in children getting the
peripheral AND central details wrong
Interviews with children should
be audio/video taped from the
first interview onwards
Evidence about suggestibility come
from lab studies, which lack
ecological validity
Not ethically possible to
replicate real-life events in lab
due to the distress and fear
THOMSON (1988)
Children's EWT is likely to suffer more and be
prone to inaccuracies in recall more than adults'
as the storage interval increases
GOODMAN and REED (1986)
Children are more likely than
adults to give the answer implied
by a leading question
LEICHTMAN and CECI (1995)
Young children will incorporate misleading
information that is repeatedly given to them
KENT and YUILLE (1987)
Younger children find it difficult to
admit to the questioner that they do not
know the answer
Want to please the questioner
When asked to identify a person they had seen
earlier, younger children were more likely than
older children to pick a person from a photo
display, even if the person's picture was not
included
GROSS and HAYNE (1996)
When the target person was absent from the
photo line-up, the children performed poorly by
wrongly selecting a picture
Children interacted with target person only two days earlier