Articles on Memory

Olafson reviews the evidence base for child forensic interviewing and the challenges of reaching children who do not disclose, disclose only partly, or later recant. She calls for developing and testing adaptations or additional approaches for very young children, children with developmental disabilities, and interviews arising in custody or visitation disputes.

Goodman-Delahunty, Cossins, and O’Brien compare expert testimony and judicial directions as ways to correct misconceptions about children in sexual abuse trials. In a mock-juror study, each of four information interventions increased participants’ knowledge, and increased knowledge related to higher credibility ratings and conviction rates in the simulated case.

Deffenbacher and colleagues combine findings from experimental studies to assess how heightened stress affects eyewitness memory. Their meta-analyses support an average negative effect of high stress on both identification accuracy and recall of crime-related details, while discussing limits in how laboratory and field studies represent stressful events.

Steblay’s meta-analysis of 19 tests found that weapon presence was associated with lower lineup identification accuracy, with a small mean effect. In a separate analysis of 10 studies measuring memory for the perpetrator’s features, weapon presence was associated with a moderate reduction in feature accuracy.

Wells and Quigley-McBride review how eyewitness-identification research has informed legal and police practices, focusing on recommendations from a 1998 American Psychology-Law Society white paper. They discuss lineup composition, double-blind administration, instructions that the suspect may be absent, immediate confidence statements, and a proposed reasonable-suspicion threshold before conducting an identification procedure.

Yantis and Jonides tested whether attention is drawn automatically to a new visual object or whether apparent capture results from masking effects. Their experiments found that targets appearing abruptly in previously blank locations receive a processing advantage, supporting temporal precedence of new objects as an explanation for attentional capture.

Cossins reviews research on misconceptions that laypeople and jurors hold about children’s memory, suggestibility, and responses to sexual abuse, including how age, education, and gender relate to those beliefs. She also examines mock-jury studies of expert testimony and discusses Australian legal reforms intended to help jurors assess children’s evidence.

Schaaf, Alexander, and Goodman studied how repeated questioning affects young children’s reports of true and false events, varying question order and event valence. Their study of 82 children ages 3 and 5 found that age, valence, and whether an event was true predicted reports, while children’s inhibitory ability and behavioral problems also related to inaccurate information.

McWilliams and colleagues analyze a case in which children testified about their mother’s murder to illustrate the accuracy and suggestibility of children’s memories for a traumatic event. They describe the children’s police interviews and later testimony, considering how interview conditions and exposure to suggestion may affect what children remember and how they resist misleading information.

This study examines why some young children make numerous false reports about an event they previously experienced. Among 61 children ages 4 to 9, performance on cognitive-control and theory-of-mind tasks predicted repeated false reports of touching, and the authors distinguish this persistent pattern from occasional memory intrusions.

Pickel, Ross, and Truelove tested whether witnesses can prevent the weapon focus effect when they are instructed to attend to a person rather than an object. Across two experiments, instruction eliminated the weapon-related difference in memory for the target, while uninstructed witnesses gave less accurate descriptions when the target carried a weapon than a book.

Chae and colleagues studied event memory and suggestibility in 322 children aged 3 to 16 who had maltreatment histories or no substantiated maltreatment history. Maltreatment status alone was not associated with poorer memory accuracy, while trauma symptoms were linked to more suggestibility among children with higher dissociation.

This National Institute of Justice guide sets out recommended practices for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence during investigations. Its sections cover first response, witness interviews, showups, and suspect identification, emphasizing nonsuggestive questioning, careful documentation, and procedures designed to reduce mistaken identifications.

Bruck and Melnyk synthesize 69 studies examining how demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial characteristics relate to children’s suggestibility. They report that language ability and creativity showed the most consistent cognitive associations, while findings for many other factors were mixed and gender and socioeconomic status were generally not systematic predictors.

Lyon, Ahern, and Scurich present a Bayesian framework for assessing how diagnostic a child’s disclosure of abuse may be, with attention to the child’s age and whether the disclosure was spontaneous. They review interviewing approaches that can improve the evidentiary value of disclosures and argue that evaluations must distinguish the probability of abuse given a disclosure from related but different probabilities.

Chae and colleagues review practical and ethical obstacles in research on maltreated children’s memory and experiences as witnesses. They discuss strategies for recruitment, consent, access to case information, and conducting studies when researchers cannot ethically recreate the distressing events or legal settings they aim to understand.

Fawcett and colleagues use meta-analysis to test explanations for weapon focus, the reduction in memory for scene details associated with a weapon’s presence. They find an overall effect and report that its size varies with retention interval, exposure duration, and threat, while their analyses found no difference by laboratory, simulated, or real-world setting.

This review assesses competing explanations for the cross-race effect, the tendency for people to recognize same-race faces more accurately than other-race faces. Young and colleagues compare perceptual-expertise accounts with social and motivational explanations, reviewing evidence about face encoding, experience, categorization, and the conditions that can strengthen or reduce the recognition difference.

Finkel describes how clinicians can obtain a child’s history in a developmentally appropriate, nonjudgmental interview and use it to form a balanced, defensible opinion in a suspected sexual abuse evaluation. The article explains how a consultative report should address physical findings, symptoms in relation to timing, and discrepancies between the child’s account and examination results.

This chapter reviews disputed claims that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered, and considers how recovered-memory testimony has been treated in court. The authors discuss research on memory distortion and suggestibility, therapeutic practices that may shape recollections, and questions for evaluating a claimant’s account, including its context and possible corroboration.

Loftus, Loftus, and Messo examine weapon focus by showing participants slides of a fast-food restaurant event in which a customer either pointed a gun or handed over a check. Participants looked longer and more often at the gun, and those who saw it recalled fewer details about the event than participants who saw the check.

In this chapter, the author recounts a case involving alleged recovered memories and explains how ordinary memory can change through reconstruction, forgetting, and source confusion. The chapter contrasts these processes with proposed forms of trauma-related amnesia and questions therapeutic methods such as hypnosis and guided imagery as means of recovering accurate memories.

Herzmann and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to examine how people encode and recognize own-race and other-race faces. Both Asian and Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more accurately, and the neural patterns suggested that race experience affected encoding as well as recognition and later monitoring of unfamiliar faces.

Pickel reports two experiments testing whether weapon focus is driven by an object’s threat or its unusualness, using videotaped interactions in business settings. Unusual objects impaired witnesses’ descriptions of the target, whereas threat did not, leading the author to suggest that weapons may draw attention because they are unexpected rather than threatening.