Eyewitness memory (child testimony)

An eyewitness testimony is a statement given under oath by a person present at an event who can describe what happened. During circumstances in which a child is a witness to the event, the child can be used to deliver a testimony on the stand. The credibility of a child, however, is often questioned due to their underdeveloped memory capacity and overall brain physiology. Researchers found that eyewitness memory requires high-order memory capacity even for well-developed adult brain. Because a child's brain is not yet fully developed, each child witness must be assessed by the proper authorities to determine their reliability as a witness and whether or not they are mature enough to accurately recall the event, provide important details and withstand leading questions.Brain development is an after-forward process; from the occipital lobe (visual), to the temporal lobe (sensory, auditory and memory), to the parietal lobe (motor, pain, temperature, and stress), and finally to the frontal lobe (language, reasoning, planning, and emotion). All of these brain regions work together to build up our eyewitness memory.Retroactive interference encourages incidental forgetting, in which the newly learned information impairs the retrieval of previously learned knowledge, especially for similar and related information. For example, if you have already learned about proactive interference and recently learned new information about retroactive interference, the knowledge you learned about retroactive interference has the tendency to impede the retrieval of the knowledge of proactive interference.In general, adolescents are far more trustworthy eyewitnesses than children. They are already fully mature in terms of cognition (i.e. narrative skills, memory recall and encoding, etc.) Researchers found that the ability to recall single pieces of spatial information developed until ages 11 to 12, while the ability to remember multiple units of information developed until ages 13 to 15. However, strategic self-organized thinking, which demands a high level of multi-tasking skill, continues to develop until ages 16 to 17.