The impact of “Do you remember...” questions on the accuracy of children’s eyewitness memory

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

The accuracy of children’s eyewitness testimony depends on the questions posed by legal professionals. Questions prefaced with “Do you remember...” (DYR) questions are considered indirect speech acts because they explicitly probe if the child remembers the information and implicitly asks the listener to provide the information (Clark, 1979; Evans, Stolzenberg, Lee, & Lyon, 2014). Theoretically, DYR questions may be less suggestive than direct questions because they first ask children whether they remember specific information versus assuming the child knows the information. In the present study, we examined whether the use of DYR prompts impacted children’s memory accuracy in a sample of 66 children (ages 4-10 years old, M = 7.34 years). Children were recruited from a local science museum and childcare centers in a midsized Midwestern city. Children individually participated in a single session with an experimenter for approximately 35 minutes. First, each child watched a 9-minute animated cartoon video about two characters searching for their missing dog in various locations such as a park and outside of an ice cream store. Next, children completed two distractor tasks. Finally, children were interviewed about their memory for the video. All interviews began with instructions for the child not to guess, to correct the interviewer if they made a mistake, and to indicate if they did not know the answer. The second portion of the interview consisted of a series of 25 questions: 10 wh- questions, 10 yes/no questions, and 5 unanswerable wh- questions. Half of the wh- questions and the yes/no questions were about details in the video (true details), and half were details that did not occur (false details). Unanswerable questions required children to guess about details not mentioned at all in the video (e.g., “What is my dog’s name?”). Across all question types, half of questions were presented directly (e.g., “How did Scooter get lost?”) and half were prefaced with a DYR prompt (e.g., “Do you remember how Scooter got lost?”). Question type was counterbalanced across interview versions. The number of correct and incorrect responses was tallied for all question types. We conducted a series of repeated measures ANOVAs with question type entered as a repeated measure. Older children provided more correct responses to both direct and DYR questions than younger children. On average, children provided approximately 10% and 20% fewer correct responses to DYR wh- and yes/no questions, respectively. Children were slightly more accurate on DYR questions for unanswerable details, but this effect was not statistically significant. A follow up study using identical procedures with a sample of 79 college-aged adults (M = 19.16 years) revealed no significant differences between adults’ accurate responses to questions asked directly and DYR questions. Our findings suggest the use of DYR prompts exert a detrimental effect on child witnesses’ memory accuracy as they are unable to appreciate the intended meaning of these questions, but this effect disappears by early adulthood.

Authors

• Christina Oksana Perez, University of Toledo
  Presenting Author

• Kristina Todorovic, University of Toledo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kamala London, University of Toledo
  Non-Presenting Author