ABSTRACT
Children differ markedly from one another in how well they recall and recount their past experiences. Whereas some children provide relatively full accounts with only minimal prompting, others say little. Likewise, some children are resistant to suggestions even when faced with strongly misleading questions, and others are less resistant. Age clearly contributes to these differences, but it by no means fully accounts for them. As Ceci, Huffman, Smith, and Loftus (1994) pointed out, “Age is a rather crude variable” and may mask important sources of individual differences. Indeed, there is often considerable variability in the way children of a similar age respond to requests for information. In research on children’s memory and testimony, such within age-group variability has typically been treated as simply random variation and largely ignored. It is almost certainly the case, however, that at least some of the differences in the detail and accuracy with which children describe their experiences are meaningful and can be accounted for. Children differ with respect to a number of cognitive, social, and personality variables, which are likely to impact on aspects of both their memory and reporting of events. Such individual differences are particularly relevant to forensic investigations, where the ability to predict, for example, if an individual child is likely to
Margaret-Ellen Pipe University of Otago, New Zealand
Karen Salmon University of New South Wales, Australia
be misled, to lie, to bemistaken, or to benefit from a particularmethod of interviewing, would be of considerable value. Such questions about the role of individual differences in forensic contexts have only begun to be asked, much less answered. Nonetheless, recent studies suggest promising directions for understanding individual differences across children that help place children’s testimony in context and provide useful leads as to how we might better accommodate all children giving evidence.
