Tele-forensic interviewing can be a reasonable alternative to face-to-face interviewing of child witnesses.

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.

Effects of interviewer familiarity and supportiveness on children's recall across repeated interviews.

Objectives: Child witnesses often describe their experiences across multiple interviews. It is unknown whether talking with a familiar interviewer increases disclosures, however, or whether any benefits of a familiar interviewer could be achieved by ensuring that interviewers (regardless of familiarity) behave in socially supportive ways. This study tested the effects of interviewer familiarity and social support on children's reports of an adult's transgressions.

The influence of disclosure history and body diagrams on children's reports of inappropriate touching: Evidence from a new analog paradigm.

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's performance on ground rules questions: implications for forensic interviewing.

Ground rules, also called interview instructions, are included in investigative interviews with children around the world. These rules aim to manage the expectations of children who are typically unaccustomed to being questioned by adults who are naïve to the children's experiences. Although analog research has examined the efficacy of ground rules instruction, a systematic analysis of children's ability to respond appropriately to each of the rules has not been reported.

Deficient cognitive control fuels children's exuberant false allegations.

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.

Comfort drawing during investigative interviews: evidence of the safety of a popular practice.

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.

Evidence supporting restrictions on uses of body diagrams in forensic interviews.

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 phenomenology of carryover effects between show-up and line-up identification.

This study explored carryover effects from show-ups to subsequent line-up identifications using a novel paradigm in which participants rendered multiple identification judgements. A total of 160 participants studied a series of faces and subsequently viewed a series of target-absent and target-present show-ups. Following a retention interval, participants then made identification judgements from a series of target-absent and target-present line-ups.