When Children Are The Worst And Best Eyewitnesses: Factors Behind The Development Of False Memory

One pertinent question in many legal proceedings concerns whether children’s memory is sufficiently reliable to depend on as evidence in legal cases. This is a vital issue because the centrepiece of many criminal trials rests on the reliability of eyewitness statements. When grappling with the reliability of children’s accounts, one is confronted with a persistently held undifferentiated assumption among legal professionals. That is, children’s memory reports are frequently deemed to be highly vulnerable to errors (i.e., false memory) and should at face value be inferior to adults’ memory reports (Brainerd, 2013). In the current synopsis, we discuss recent experimental evidence that challenges this assumption, showing that proneness to false memories is highly malleable and changes in age-dependent predictable ways.