Understanding how children’s minds work when they answer questions could have serious implications for both educational practices and legal processes. A recent study explored the relationship between children’s cognitive skills—specifically working memory and response inhibition—and their suggestibility during questioning. Published by researchers from Sapienza University, the findings add new dimensions to our comprehension of how these factors can affect a child’s testimony.
Interrogative suggestibility refers to how much a person might change their recollection of an event when asked suggestive questions during an interrogation. This phenomenon has profound implications, especially given that children are often deemed less reliable witnesses due to their more malleable memories. The research involved a sample of 203 children aged 8 to 14 years, generating significant insights into how cognitive abilities correlate with suggestibility.
"Children having higher span scores were less suggestible than children having lower span scores," the authors noted, pointing to the influence of working memory. This suggests that children who can remember information better are also less likely to fall for misleading inquiries, a crucial finding given the context of witness testimonies.
The study deployed the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale to measure suggestibility among participants, who listened to a story and were then tested on their recollection and answers to misleading questions. Additionally, researchers employed verbal span tasks to assess working memory capacity and conducted the Stroop Color and Word Test, alongside the Global–Local Task, to measure response inhibition. The study concluded that while higher working memory correlated with lower suggestibility, the impact of inhibitory skills on suggestibility was not as pronounced, suggesting that other factors might play significant roles during this age.
The implications of the findings extend to understanding developmental differences in cognitive capabilities. For instance, older children attending middle school recalled more accurate story components than younger primary school peers, providing less affirmative responses to misleading prompts. "Older children attending middle school remembered more correct story elements and provided less assents to misleading questions than younger children attending primary school," the researchers revealed, underscoring the influence of age on cognitive performance.
This research not only highlights the importance of working memory in determining suggestibility but also calls for further exploration into how cognitive functions develop in children. Understanding these processes will be crucial for refining the ways in which children are interviewed in both legal and forensic contexts.
As reflectively noted, the authors conclude that "individual differences in working memory and inhibitory skills have a limited impact on interrogative suggestibility, at least during middle childhood." These insights illuminate the complexity of interrogative suggestibility and the cognitive landscape of children, suggesting that while memory capacity is a factor, it may not be the sole influencer of how children construct their narratives in response to questioning.
