An Introduction to Forensic Child Interviews
This resource surveys research and guidance on interviewing child witnesses, including techniques that can distort children’s reports. It discusses reinforcement, peer information, speculation, rapport, and open-ended questioning, then includes studies on interviewer practices, remote interviews, and children’s responses to “I don’t know” instructions.
Child Suggestibility
Children’s suggestibility describes how post-event influences can alter recollection, with susceptibility shaped by more than age alone. The resource reviews research on memory strength, source monitoring, interview context, and interviewer bias, including studies of children’s responses to misleading questions and inaccurate reports.
COUNTERING Counterintuitive Testimony (Child, handout)
This State Bar of Arizona handout examines testimony about children’s responses and behavior in child sexual abuse cases. It surveys issues including disclosure timing, changing accounts, continued contact, interviewing practices, possible confounds, confirmation bias, and research relevant to evaluating competing explanations.
Memory Drift
This compilation gathers research using the term ‘drift’ in studies of memory strength, recall, forgetting, and decision processes, alongside work on warning signals and predator memory. The cited papers examine different tasks and models, including delayed judgments of learning and age-related memory performance, so the collection presents research topics rather than direct evidence about memory changes in a particular witness.
Memory in the Courtroom: What Every Attorney Should Know
Eye witness testimony is central to almost every aspect of a criminal proceedings. Yet this central dynamic is rarely taught for attorneys. Dr. Simpson has provided this training for the State Bar of Arizona (ten times), for the Pima County Public Defender’s Office, and multiple legal offices for the Air Force and Marine JAGS. This 199-page seminar handout is packed with research regarding:
- Principles of memory
- Memory “failures”
- Suggestibility
- Eyewitness memory
- Cognitive interview techniques
- Child eyewitness memory
- The NICHD Standard
- Alcoholic blackout
- Childhood amnesic barrier
- Confirmation bias
- Context effect
- Cross-race effects
- Cryptomnesia
- Egocentric bias
- Fading affect bias
- Self-generation effect
- Hindsight bias
- Illusion-of-Truth effect
- Imagination Inflation
- Leveling and Sharpening
- Misattribution of Memory
- Misinformation effect
- Mood-congruent memory
- Schema / Script memory
- Gist memory
- Telescoping effect
- Weapon focus
Parent-Child Conversations, Principe and London, 2022
Principe and London review research on how conversations between parents and children can shape children’s memories before formal forensic interviews. They explain how parental questions, suggestions, and shared retellings may influence children’s accounts and discuss implications for interviewing and evaluating young witnesses.