"That never happened": Adults' discernment of children's true and false memory reports

Research on children’s false memories of entire events has garnered considerable attention in recent years. Such research is propelled by the important role children’s reports can play in the legal system. A prime example stems from the crime of child sexual abuse. This serious offense poses a special challenge for the criminal justice system because it often leaves no physical trace. Other kinds of cases that frequently involve children, such as custody or domestic violence, can also hinge considerably on children’s reports. Ideally, such reports would always be both true and complete, but the specter of children’s false reports (children’s incorrect reporting that an event occurred when in fact it did not), and conversely, false denials (children’s incorrect denial that an event happened when it actually did occur) raises serious concerns. Fortunately, the legal system can tolerate false reports and false denials as long as fact finders correctly assess witness accuracy. However, if adults are unable to reliably identify children’s false reports and false denials, or if adults fail to give credence to children’s accurate reports and accurate denials, serious miscarriages of justice may result. In the present study, we evaluated adults’ abilities to discern 3- and 5-year-olds’ true and false memory reports. Specifically, we examined adults’ abilities to assess children’s accurate reports, false reports, accurate denials, and false denials. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to examine adults’ abilities to differentiate children’s true from false memory reports of entire incidents. There is longstanding concern that it can be difficult for adults to identify accurate reports made by child witnesses due to the limitations inherent in their cognitive and socio-emotional development. This concern is amplified by findings that young children can be led into making false reports of entire events (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Goodman, 1984). However, children’s denials are also of critical importance (Lyon, 1999). False denials could occur in situations where, for example, children who were actually abused deny the abuse, and accurate denials could occur in cases where a third party suspects wrongdoing that did not in fact occur. For justice to prevail, adults cannot treat any of these four types of child statements with misplaced credence or unwarranted skepticism. For our study, adults evaluated interviews of children who were suggestively questioned about true and false events but not instructed to intentionally lie. Instead, we used a variant of a false memory paradigm (e.g., Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). In response to the interviews, children spontaneously answered with true reports, true denials, false reports, or false denials. Thus, the false reports and false denials used as stimuli did not necessarily reflect deliberate, premeditated deception, although that is one possibility. Children might falsely assent or falsely deny for a variety of reasons, including succumbing to demand characteristics during an interview (e.g., Bjorklund et al., 2000; Cassel, Roebers, & Bjorkland, 1996), using their imaginations (Reyna, Holliday, & Marche, 2002), being deficient in certain social cognitive realms (e.g., incomplete understanding of honesty, Bussey, 1992; limited theory of mind or inadequate inhibition, Talwar & Lee, 2008), having been coached or coerced into lying (e.g., Ackil & Zaragoza, 1998; Lyon, Malloy, Quas, & Talwar, 2008), trying to conform to social expectations of politeness (e.g., Talwar, Murphy, & Lee 2007), or acquiescing to persistent questioning (e.g., Schaaf, Alexander, & Goodman, 2008). Children who falsely deny an event might also do so to avoid talking about an unpleasant or embarrassing experience (Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1998), evade punishment (e.g., Polak & Harris, 1999; Talwar, Gordon, & Lee, 2007), or reduce the chances of getting someone else in trouble (e.g., Goodman-Brown, Edelstein, Goodman, Jones, & Gordon, 2003). In the current study, adults evaluated true and false memory reports made by preschoolers. Young children were of special interest because they are particularly vulnerable to the aforementioned developmental limitations and social forces, including false memory reports. Despite such limitations, research reveals that children make great strides in cognitive and social development during the preschool years, in concert with increased resistance to suggestion (Harris, Goodman, Augusti, Chae, & Alley, 2009). Additionally, children’s social awareness and understanding of truth and lies improves substantially during this developmental period (e.g., Lee & Cameron, 2000). For such reasons, researchers have paid particular attention to the accuracy and suggestibility of preschoolers’ eyewitness memory (e.g., Goodman & Reed, 1986; Poole & Lindsay, 1998). Yet, there is surprisingly little research on adults’ abilities to discern children’s true memory from false memory accounts of entire events.