NCJ Number
154243
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 19 Issue: 2 Dated: (April 1995) Pages: 197-216
Date Published
1995
Length
20 pages
Annotation
Three experiments were conducted with kindergarten children to investigate the tendency of young witnesses to guess when presented with a target-absent lineup.
Abstract
After viewing a slide show of a staged theft, children were interviewed to assess their memory of the event and were asked to identify the perpetrator. In the first experiment, 64 children were randomly assigned to different lineup conditions to determine if they had a reasonably good memory of the perpetrator. The second experiment involved 80 kindergarten children and was designed to investigate children's behavior with an alternative identification procedure, the showup versus the lineup. The third experiment used 64 kindergarten children to investigate the role of attention and event encoding on children's subsequent ability to identify the perpetrator. Children made false positive identification errors when viewing a target-absent lineup, and many children who initially recognized the perpetrator went on to identify someone else when subsequently shown a target-absent lineup. Neither allowing the children to view the slide show twice (with instructions to attend to the perpetrator) nor providing them with nonverbal means of rejecting the lineup increased accuracy. The showup procedure appeared to facilitate children's identification decisions but increased the risk of false accusations. Experimental results emphasize the strength of children's tendency to guess and point to the role of relative judgments in contributing to children's errors in making identifications. 40 references and 1 table