Debra A. Poole - US grants

The proposed study addresses the need to develop effective techniques for interviewing young children who have been the victims of crime or witnesses to criminal acts. Because lengthy involvement in the legal and social service system may increase the trauma experienced by young children, several agencies and professional organizations have drafted recommendations to limit the number of times a child witness is interviewed. However, little is known about the impact these procedures will have on the quality of young children's testimony. Specifically, this project will document changes in the content and style of testimony across repeated questions both within and between interviews. Children in three age groups (4-, 6-, and 8- year-olds) and adults will witness an interaction between two adults that contains both unambiguous and ambiguous events. Each subject will then answer questions about those events either immediately after the events and one week later, or only after a one-week delay. During each interview, all questions will be re- peated three times. With respect to the content of their testimonies, subject's accuracy for the central events and details of the events will be recorded as a function of interview condition, as well as their tendency to respond to questions about which they have no information. The probability of response change will be computed within and between interviews for each question type. In addition, changes in response style that might affect judgments of credibility will be coded, such as speaking rate and number of nonverbal responses. In summary, the proposed research will delineate the effects of repeated interviews on the accuracy and presentation style of testimony from children and adults. This knowledge will aid policymakers in their attempts to balance the needs of the courts with those of child witnesses.

9409231 POOLE This project will use a powerful new suggestibility manipulation to examine several important issues concerning the strengths and weaknesses of children as witnesses. The technique, an analog of parental involvement in false allegations of abuse, is fully piloted and involves no deception. In Phase 1, children between the ages of 3 and 8 years will participate in a series of events and will be interviewed to determine what they can report about those events. Three months later, parents will read the children a story that includes descriptions of events the children had experienced and events they had not experienced. The children will then be reinterviewed on two occasions with a stepwise procedure in which nonsuggestive questions are followed by leading questions and a series of questions that specifically ask the children to distinguish between events they experienced and events they only heard described. Because the interview procedures yield information about individual differences in recall, forgetting, acquiescence (i.e., saying "yes" to a suggestion), and source monitoring (i.e., distinguishing between memories from several sources), these data will be a first step in constructing a systematic theory of the factors responsible for developmental changes in suggestibility. This project will accomplish the following goals: (a) trace developmental trends in susceptibility to false information provided by parents; (b) evaluate the types of false reports that are elicited by interview procedures with varying degrees of prompting; (c) evaluate developmental changes in recall, acquiescence, and memory source monitoring; and (d) test the adequacy of various causal models that specify the contributions of these processes to children's suggestibility. The resulting data will have important implications for how investigations of child abuse allegations are conducted, and will contribute to the development of interview procedures that more adequat ely test alternative hypotheses about the sources of children's reports. ***

Abstract Poole 9709111 There is a pressing need to develop interviewing procedures that enhance children's ability to discriminate, in their eyewitness reports, between events they remember experiencing versus events they remember hearing other people describe. This research builds on earlier work by these investigators that demonstrated that misinformation from parents often infiltrates the autobiographical reports of 3- to 8-year-old children, that errors appear even during the free-narrative portion of interviews, that asking explicit source-monitoring questions improves older children's ability to distinguish between events that actually occurred versus misinformation. The current project develops and tests interviewing techniques designed to help young witnesses escape the contaminating influence of prior exposure to misleading suggestions. In the first phase 1160 children play individually with an unfamiliar man (Mr. Science) and subsequently participate in an interview about the Mr. Science experience. Three months later, parents read a story to their children and the children are interviewed in three conditions: source-monitoring training (SMT) before or after the interview or no training control. Data analyses assess the efficacy of SMT for reducing false reports in free-narrative response without reducing accurate reports, the effects of SMT on accuracy of answers to leading questions, developmental trends in performance during SMT and the interview, and relations between individual difference variables and accuracy of testimony. This research answers basic questions about children's suggestibility and source-monitoring ability and practical issues of significance for forensic interviewing. %%% There is a pressing need to develop interviewing procedures that enhance children's ability to discriminate, in their eyewitness reports, between events they remember experiencing versus events they remember hearing other people describe. This research builds on earlier work by these investigators that demonstrated that misinformation from parents often infiltrates the autobiographical reports of 3- to 8-year-old children, that errors appear even during the free-narrative portion of interviews, that asking explicit source-monitoring questions improves older children's ability to distinguish between events that actually occurred versus misinformation. The current project develops and tests interviewing techniques designed to help young witnesses escape the contaminating influence of prior exposure to misleading suggestions. In the first phase 1160 children play individually with an unfamiliar man (Mr. Science) and subsequently participate in an interview about the Mr. Science experience. Three months later, parents read a story to their children and the children are interviewed in three conditions: source-monitoring training (SMT) before or after the interview or no training control. Data analyses assess the efficacy of SMT for reducing false reports in free-narrative response without reducing accurate reports, the effects of SMT on accuracy of answers to leading questions, developmental trends in performance during SMT and the interview, and relations between individual difference variables and accuracy of testimony. This research answers basic questions about children's suggestibility and source-monitoring ability and practical issues of significance for forensic interviewing. ***

Abstract
Collaborative Research: The Impact of Cuing on Children's Eyewitness
Testimony and Source Monitoring

Each year, child protection workers, police officers, and staff members at child advocacy centers interview tens of thousands of children who are believed to be victims or witnesses of crimes. Because sexual abuse cases are especially difficult to investigate, efforts to develop interviewing techniques for child witnesses have focused on procedures for eliciting accurate information about inappropriate sexual contact. Currently, two forensic interviewing procedures dominate public policy: One emphasizes techniques for transferring control of the conversation to children and eliciting information with free-recall prompts, whereas the other cues children to report abuse experiences with body drawings and direct (specific) questions about touching. Protocols that emphasize free recall are often viewed as pro-defense (because these guidelines help prevent false allegations by discouraging questions containing specific event details), whereas protocols that emphasize interviewing aids and specific questions are viewed as pro-prosecution (because many professionals believe these procedures help children disclose abuse).
The current controversy about how to interview children stems mainly from a widespread but untested belief that conversational techniques that minimize false reports also reduce disclosures of embarrassing events. Supporting this belief is the well-known finding that encouraging children to describe events in their own words results in fewer false reports than cuing children with direct questions, but that a series of direct questions elicits more detailed narratives. However, previous studies that found benefits from cuing children's memories generally asked children to describe events that were known to have occurred, the topic of discussion was identified, and interviewers presented memory cues after children had already described events in their own words. These studies do not, however, tell us whether cuing early in an interview results in more accurate or complete testimony when the veracity of allegations is unknown or when children may have been exposed to misinformation about what actually happened. In fact, two well-researched phenomena-retrieval-induced forgetting and encoding specificity-demonstrate that cues often suppress memory for contextual information and decrease the number of items recalled. For example, adults in a pilot study who viewed photographs to help them recall sentences recalled fewer sentences than adults who simply recalled the sentences did, and these adults also were less likely to recall which of two individuals had provided the sentences.
The current project consists of two studies that will determine how cuing descriptions of experienced events with line drawings and specific questions influences the quality of information provided by children who are 4 to 9 years of age. Study 1 will explore the practical significance of cuing with a well-researched paradigm in which children experience an engaging event, are exposed to false information about that event, and receive interviews that mimic the two major styles. Study 2 is a basic memory study that will maximize the ability to detect developmental changes in the impact of cuing. Both studies will measure the effects of cuing on memory for events and source information, which is information about where children initially learned the information. Results will contribute to understanding basic memory mechanisms by documenting how cuing influences children's recall, guide future research on eyewitness testimony by illuminating the strengths and limitations of two interviewing styles, and impact state- and national-level training for professionals who investigate crimes against children and other vulnerable groups.

This award is funded under the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).


Protocols for conducting forensic interviews of children should be informed by research, but interviewers who obtain evidence from alleged victims of abuse frequently use unresearched techniques. This project examines two popular procedures: cuing event reports with body outlines and comfort drawing, which is the practice of encouraging children to draw as a calming activity. Both techniques are intended to take pressure off anxious children, but explicit cuing and play could reduce the accuracy of reports. An important feature of this project is the inclusion of parent and observational measures of behavioral inhibition, a temperamental trait associated with little spontaneous speech. If body outlines or drawing activities encourage more detailed and accurate testimony, the benefits should be especially evident among behaviorally inhibited children.
Participating children (ages 4- to 9-years) completed a study that evaluated how two interviewing protocols impact eyewitness accuracy. The children were exposed to target events, repeatedly told about nonexperienced events, and randomly assigned to interviewing protocols. One protocol included free-recall, specific, and source-monitoring questions, whereas the second included cued-recall, free-recall, and source-monitoring questions.
Study 1 adds measures of behavioral inhibition to the existing data set, thereby permitting analyses of accuracy as a function of temperament. Study 2 exposes children to a new event and conducts final interviews in comfort drawing and no comfort drawing conditions. This study therefore evaluates the long-term impact of memory cuing and determines how a distracting activity influences the eyewitness accuracy of behaviorally inhibited and uninhibited children. Results from these studies will advance forensic interviewing practice by determining the impact of cuing and comfort drawing on children's testimonial and source monitoring accuracy. The project will also guide future research by revealing whether temperamental measures help evaluate tradeoffs between the emotional and cognitive consequences of interviewing techniques.

Currently, there is no consensus on which interviewing techniques provide the most reliable evidence from alleged victims of child physical and sexual abuse. One style of interviewing, which reflects decades of research on children's eyewitness testimony, encourages children to describe events in their own words and avoids specific questions and props. In contrast, another style seeks to maximize disclosures through the use of body diagrams and specific questions about touching. Unfortunately, the debate over which method best distinguishes abused from nonabused children, and the field of children's eyewitness testimony itself, are at an impasse. This research project uses a new approach that allows researchers to safely and ethically test between these two different approaches in a laboratory setting. Results will determine whether eyewitness findings vary for children with different disclosure histories and whether the positioning of body diagrams in interviews influences rates of true and false reports.

Information about optimal interviewing practices has the potential to influence state and national-level interviewing policies utilized by law enforcement officials.

Despite widespread dissemination of best-practice standards for conducting forensic interviews, many jurisdictions lack the expertise to skillfully investigate crimes involving child witnesses. An efficient way to ensure that all jurisdictions have access to highly trained child interviewers is to conduct remote (live-streaming video) forensic interviews. Remote interviewing could reduce investigative response time, spare investigative resources, and accelerate case disposition. However, the ability of remote interviewing to elicit eyewitness evidence from children has not been sufficiently tested and, therefore, will certainly prompt challenges regarding children?s testimonial reliability. The current project is a comprehensive and theoretically grounded evaluation of the effectiveness of remote interviewing of child witnesses. Results will be disseminated to scientists and forensic professionals through publications and presentations, thereby informing policies and guidelines for the use of remote forensic interviews with children. Because remote interviewing increases access to specialized expertise, project results will also impact how children are questioned by electronic means in non-forensic contexts. The project will provide research training to dozens of students at two research sites and promote greater awareness of evidence-based practice through outreach to practitioners who work with child witnesses.

Using an established paradigm that produces salient touching experiences, individual children at two sites (ages 4 to 8 years) will be told that a male assistant can no longer touch their skin when he delivers a germ education program. The assistant will touch each child once and realize an impending mistake before he completes a second touch. Afterward, children will hear a story from their parents that contains misinformation about the experience, including narrative about a nonexperienced touch. During interviews conducted in traditional face-to-face or remote formats, children will answer questions about the germ education event and answer a series of questions that tests their ability to distinguish experienced from suggested events. By comparing the completeness and accuracy of children?s testimonies across formats, this study will determine whether remote interviewing elicits testimony that is comparable in quality to the testimony elicited by face-to-face interviewing. Measures of behavioral inhibition and executive function will determine whether remote interviewing is beneficial for children who are behaviorally inhibited or contraindicated for typically-developing children who have poor cognitive control.