In general, older children are more accurate in eyewit-
ness reports than are younger children, although even
preschool-age children can provide accurate accounts
of salient or personally meaningful events, including
their own victimization. When asked free recall and
open-ended questions, preschoolers can recall rele-
vant and accurate information, but on average they are
less responsive and provide fewer spontaneous state-
ments than older children and adults. Because young
children’s free reports are generally relatively brief
and incomplete, they are often exposed to specific and
leading questions in forensic situations, which are
indeed more likely to elicit the child’s memory of an
event. On the negative side, however, children are less
accurate than adults in response to specific questions
and more vulnerable to interviewers’ implied sugges-
tions. Particularly, closed questions, such as yes/no
and forced-choice questions, can be problematic for
young children, because they may guess instead of
providing “I don’t know” responses. Children also
often have considerable difficulty in using standard-
ized units of measurement, such as minutes and
months, and in indicating the number of times highly
repeated acts have occurred, even though such infor-
mation can be vital in a legal case.
Usually, children’s testimony is required for crimes
or experiences that are negative, if not traumatic.
Although this is a subject of debate, considerable
research with adults suggests that for stressful compared
with nonstressful events, central features (e.g., the main
stressors) are retained particularly well, whereas periph-
eral details are less well remembered. Several studies
confirm such findings for children; however, the results
of developmental studies are mixed.
Child sexual abuse often involves trauma to child
victims, leading to feelings of self-blame and help-
lessness. These characteristics have contributed to
make child sexual abuse situations of special interest
in debates about trauma and memory. Research sug-
gests that memory of traumatic events, in many ways,
follows the same cognitive principles as memory of
distinctive nontraumatic events. However, there is
debate as to whether “special memory mechanisms”
(e.g., repression) are also involved.
Some of the main theoretical accounts of trauma
and memory suggest that traumatized individuals
remember trauma-related information particularly
well. Empirical evidence confirms that traumatized
individuals, especially those who have developed
posttraumatic stress disorder, overfocus on traumacues, have difficulty ignoring trauma stimuli, and
remember their trauma experiences. In contrast, other
theories indicate that trauma victims, such as incest
survivors, may experience amnesia for the trauma and
that children who have suffered a larger number of
traumatic events tend to forget or remember more
poorly those experiences compared with children who
have been exposed to a single traumatic event.
Children’s memory and testimony about negative
emotional experiences also depend on individuals’
coping strategies. Avoidant coping strategies lead
children to evade thoughts, conversations, or reminders
about the traumatic experiences. Parents’ attempts to
minimize or ignore their own or their children’s dis-
tress facilitate avoidant coping. These postevent avoid-
ance processes may prevent the creation of a complete,
detailed, and verbally accessible account of the trau-
matic experience and the integration of these memo-
ries with the individual’s other autobiographical
memories. In contrast, positive parent-child interac-
tions provide an opportunity for rehearsal and reactiva-
tion of event details, which may help maintain and
strengthen memory traces, thus reducing the effects of
decay while enhancing long-term retention. For exam-
ple, children who received maternal support after dis-
closure of child sexual abuse and who discussed the
event with their mothers provided more accurate
reports, with fewer omission errors, of their maltreat-
ment experiences years after the abuse reportedly
ended compared with those who did not.
Children’s suggestibility in the forensic context has
been a flash point in the debate over children’s testi-
monial competence. Suggestibility concerns the degree
to which the encoding, storage, retrieval, and report-
ing of events can be influenced by a range of internal
(e.g., developmental, cognitive, and personality) and
external (e.g., social and contextual) factors. False
information given before, during, and after an event
can lead to difficulty in retrieving the original (true)
information, alteration of true memory representa-
tions, and/or conscious acquiescence to social demands.
Young children, specifically preschoolers, are dispro-
portionately susceptible to the effects of leading ques-
tions and suggestions. However, of importance in the
legal context, children are often less suggestible about
negative than positive or neutral events.
Both cognitive and social factors can underlie
developmental differences in eyewitness memory and
suggestibility. Due to a less complete knowledge
base and more limited capabilities of using memory78 ———Children’s TestimonyC-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 78