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OBJECTIVE: Tele-forensic interviews have the potential to aid investigations when children live far from interviewers, there is a risk of disease transmission, or when expertise is not locally available. However, it is unknown whether tele-forensic interviewing is an effective alternative to face-to-face interviewing, particularly for children most prone to suggestibility and lapses of attention. HYPOTHESES: Previous studies suggested that school-age children would provide similar amounts of information across interview modes but provided no basis for predicting how misinformation impacts accuracy across modes or how 4- and 5-year-olds would react to tele-forensic interviewing. METHOD: Children (4-8 years, N = 261, Mage = 6.42 years, 48% female) interacted with male assistants who violated a no-touching rule, parents read children a book containing misinformation about that event, and female assistants conducted interviews (usually 2 weeks after the event) face-to-face or via a video conference application. RESULTS: The children were more talkative during a practice narrative phase when interviewed face-to-face rather than on screen (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.26, 95% CI [1.06, 1.51]), and 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds said more in response to open-ended prompts when interviewed face-to-face (IRR = 1.50, 95% CI [1.08, 2.09]). Children younger than 7 years also disclosed the face touch and noncompleted handshake in response to earlier and less directive prompts when interviewed face-to-face, rs(53) = .28, p = .037, and rs(48) = .33, p = .021, respectively. Children 8 years and older, however, disclosed the face touch more readily when they spoke on screen, rs(28) = -.38, p = .036, and older 7-year-olds and 8-year-olds disclosed the noncompleted handshake more readily on screen, rs(30) = -.36, p = .042. Across interview modes, children reported comparable numbers of touch events, however, and were equally accurate on challenging source-monitoring and detail questions. CONCLUSIONS: Tele-forensic interviewing can be a reasonable alternative to face-to-face interviewing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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OBJECTIVE: Effective practices for eliciting and analyzing children's eyewitness reports rely on accurate conclusions about age differences in how children retain information and respond to memory probes. Binning, which is the practice of categorizing continuous variables into discrete groups, can lower studies' power to detect age differences and, in some situations, produce significant but spurious effects. In this article, we (a) describe a systematic review that estimated the frequency of binning age in child eyewitness studies, (b) analyze real and simulated data to illustrate how binning can distort conclusions about age and covariate effects, and (c) demonstrate best practices for analyzing and reporting age trends. HYPOTHESES: We expected that researchers would frequently bin age and that we would replicate the negative consequences of binning in the demonstration data sets. METHOD: For the systematic review, we retrieved 58 articles describing child eyewitness studies and determined whether researchers binned age for one randomly selected analysis per article. We then compared alternative ways of analyzing actual and simulated data sets. RESULTS: Researchers binned age for 64% of the analyses (88% of analyses involving experimental manipulations vs. 35% of the nonexperimental analyses, φ = .55, p < .01). A significant age trend in the real data example was nonsignificant when age was treated as categorical, and in the simulated data sets we demonstrate how this practice may lead to detecting a spurious effect. CONCLUSIONS: Treating age as a continuous variable maximizes power to detect real differences without inflating the frequency of spurious results, thereby ensuring that policies regarding child eyewitnesses reflect developmental changes in children's needs and abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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When researchers and helping professionals interview children about a target event, how long should they tolerate silence before delivering another prompt? In other words, at what point are children so unlikely to begin talking again that continued silence would likely be unproductive? To test the reasonableness of a 10-s wait time guideline during open-ended prompting, we analyzed the wait times of research assistants (N = 7) who interviewed with a 10-s guideline, timed how quickly children responded to prompts, and also timed pauses within children's event narratives. In our sample (105 conversations with children aged 4-8 years), interviewers complied fully with the 10-s rule in the majority of interviews, children often paused for longer than 5 s before beginning to talk about the event or continuing a narrative, and more than 96% of children's pauses that were followed by event information fell within the 10-s window. These findings show that the 10-s wait time was a practical guideline that gave children time to respond without peppering interviews with uncomfortably long pauses. We conclude that adding wait time guidelines to protocols for interviewing children, and augmenting guidelines with wait time training for research assistants and helping professionals, could improve the quality of information obtained from children and advance our understanding of age differences in event memory.

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We tested a new paradigm for child eyewitness research that incorporates children's disclosure histories into analog study designs. Mr. Science-Germ Detective creates meaningful touching experiences and varied patterns of preinterview disclosures by convincing children that touching in the laboratory is potentially contaminating (germy). Children (N = 287, 4 to 8 years) heard that Mr. Science could no longer touch children's skin and then participated in an educational program involving 2 attempted touches. A week later, their disclosure histories were determined by a phone call that occurred a day before a forensic-style interview in the laboratory. This interview was delivered in 1 of 2 conditions: with early open-ended and more focused prompts delivered without a diagram (conventional-first condition) or with an initial diagram-assisted phase (diagram-first condition). Results confirmed that the new paradigm produces salient touches and performance patterns across open-ended and more focused questions that mirror well-known findings in eyewitness studies. A diagram made it easier for research assistants to elicit detailed reports of touching, but only among children 5 years and older who had not previously disclosed. Accuracy rates were comparable across interview conditions for early substantive phases but declined among older children when interviewers used diagrams to elicit additional reports late in interviews. These findings demonstrate that disclosure history is an important variable to include in analog study designs and confirm that Germ Detective is a promising paradigm for initial tests of new interviewing strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record

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In eyewitness studies as in actual investigations, a minority of children generate numerous false (and sometimes incredulous) allegations. To explore the characteristics of these children, we reinterviewed and administered a battery of tasks to 61 children (ages 4-9 years) who had previously participated in an eyewitness study where a man broke a "germ rule" twice when he tried to touch them. Performance on utilization, response conflict (Luria tapping), and theory of mind tasks predicted the number of false reports of touching (with age and time since the event controlled) and correctly classified 90.16% of the children as typical witnesses or exuberant (more than 3) false reporters. Results of a factor analysis pointed to a common process underlying performance on these tasks that accounted for 49% of the variability in false reports. Relations between task performance and testimony confirmed that the mechanisms underlying occasional intrusions are different from those that drive persistent confabulation and that deficient cognitive control fuels young children's exuberant false reports.

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OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated the impact of comfort drawing (allowing children to draw during interviews) on the quality of children's eyewitness reports. METHODS: Children (N=219, 5 to 12 years) who had participated in an earlier memory study returned 1 or 2 years later, experienced a new event, and described these events during phased, investigative-style interviews. Interviewers delivered the same prompts to children in the no drawing and drawing conditions but provided paper and markers in the drawing condition, invited these children to draw, and periodically asked if they would like to make another picture. RESULTS: Most children in the drawing condition were interested in using the materials, and measures of eyewitness performance were sensitive to differences in cognitive ability (i.e., age) and task difficulty (i.e., delay between the remote event and interview). Comfort drawing had no overall impact as evidenced by nonsignificant main effects of condition across 20 performance measures, although more of the younger children reported experienced touching in the drawing than no drawing condition. CONCLUSIONS: The children successfully divided attention between voluntary drawing and conversations about past events. Importantly, comfort drawing did not impair the amount of information recalled, the accuracy of children's answers, or even the extent to which interviewers needed to prompt for answers. Due to the large number of analyses, the benefit of drawing for younger, touched children requires replication. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Comfort drawing poses no documented risks for typically-developing school-aged children, but the practice remains untested for younger children and those with cognitive impairments.

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There is a long-held assumption that objects help bridge the gap between what children know and what they can (or are willing to) explain. In this review, we present research on the extent to which two types of objects used as props in investigative interviews of children, anatomical dolls and body (human figure) diagrams, actually help children report accurate information about autobiographical events. We explain why available research does not instill confidence that props are the best solution to interviewing challenges, and we consider practitioners' and policy-makers responses to this evidence. Finally, we discuss the types of developmental research that are necessary to advance the field of evidence-based interviewing of children.

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Everson and Faller's (2012) article on the significance of sexualized behavior in child sexual abuse assessments critiques a chapter by Poole and Wolfe (2009), but their objections assumed conclusions and practice implications that were not contained in that chapter. In this comment, I reiterate the value of educating adults about normative sexual and nonsexual behavior that could be misconstrued as symptoms of sexual abuse in some children, review key points from the chapter, and point out that Everson and Faller's critique supports the chapter's take-home messages (i.e., the importance of gathering information from multiple sources and the need to test alternative hypotheses for concerning behavior, consider the overall context of individual cases, and obtain independent verification of evidence).

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OBJECTIVE: This study compared two methods for questioning children about suspected abuse: standard interviewing and body-diagram-focused (BDF) interviewing, a style of interviewing in which interviewers draw on a flip board and introduce the topic of touching with a body diagram. METHODS: Children (N=261) 4-9 years of age individually participated in science demonstrations during which half the children were touched two times. Months later, parents read stories to their children that described accurate and inaccurate information about the demonstrations. The stories for untouched children also contained inaccurate descriptions of touching. The children completed standard or BDF interviews, followed by source-monitoring questions. RESULTS: Interview format did not significantly influence (a) children's performance during early interview phases, (b) the amount of contextual information children provided about the science experience, or (c) memory source monitoring. The BDF protocol had beneficial and detrimental effects on touch reports: More children in the BDF condition reported experienced touching, but at the expense of an increased number of suggested and spontaneous false reports. CONCLUSIONS: The two props that are characteristic of BDF interviewing have different effects on testimonial accuracy. Recording answers on a flip board during presubstantive phases does not influence the quality of information that children provide. Body diagrams, however, suggest answers to children and elicit a concerning number of false reports. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Until research identifies procedures and/or case characteristics associated with accurate reports of touching during diagram-assisted questioning, interviewers should initiate discussions about touching with open-ended questions delivered without a body diagram.

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The belief that props help children report abuse has fostered the widespread use of anatomical dolls and body diagrams in forensic interviews. Yet studies involving alleged abuse victims, children who have experienced medical examinations, and children who have participated in staged events have failed to find consistent evidence that props improve young children's ability to report key information related to bodily contact. Because props elevate the risk of erroneous touch reports, interviewers need to reconsider the belief that props are developmentally appropriate in forensic interviews, and researchers need to explore new approaches for eliciting disclosures of inappropriate touching.

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This study explored whether a source-monitoring training (SMT) procedure, in which children distinguished between events they recently witnessed versus events they only heard described, would help 3- to 8-year-olds to report only experienced events during a target interview. Children (N = 132) who witnessed science demonstrations and subsequently heard their parents describe nonexperienced events received SMT before or after a forensic-style interview. SMT reduced the number of false reports that 7- and 8-year-old children reported in response to direct questions but had no impact on the performance of younger children. Combined with earlier results, these data suggest a transition between 3 and 8 years of age in the strategic use of source-monitoring information to support verbal reports, such that only 7- and 8-year-olds generalize training to a difficult memory task that does not include mention of specific alternative sources.

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