Harnessing metacognition to assess the accuracy of memory reports from children in the Criminal Justice System

Each year, millions of child witnesses, from as young as 2-years old, provide evidence based on their memory of events in Criminal Justice Systems around the world. Child witnesses, including victims, are increasingly being asked to remember what they experienced by police officers during an investigation. These recollections can go on to be recounted to a courtroom, as key evidence during a trial.

The accuracy of child memory evidence needs to be correctly assessed at multiple stages of the legal process to ensure its reliability: police officers determine which investigatory leads they should prioritise based on testimony; prosecutors decide if the evidence is strong enough to charge the suspect with an offence; judges decide if the evidence is reliable enough to be allowed in the courtroom; and jurors decide whether the evidence warrants the suspect receiving a guilty verdict.

Currently, no policy or practice guidance exists to assess the accuracy of children's memory evidence. The PI's work has made it clear that legal practitioners recognise the lack of empirically-informed guidance. Some guidance exists to try to determine if a child is lying.

But few children intentionally fabricate testimony, and most honest accounts contain both accurate and inaccurate information. With no guidance, legal decision-makers largely rely on witness age to decide whether to trust memory evidence. This is problematic.

Age often does not predict accuracy, and cannot discriminate between accurate and inaccurate information within an individual's testimony. Relying on age has resulted in miscarriages of justice: children have been seriously injured or murdered after their testimony was erroneously deemed to be less accurate than an adult's, and innocent people have been wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.

Our project will determine how legal decision-makers (e.g. police officers, prosecutors, judges, jurors) could estimate the accuracy of information in honest memory reports from children. It will do that by investigating and harnessing a previously overlooked, but crucially informative, aspect of memory: metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to monitor when our own memories are accurate or inaccurate.

Children's metacognitive cues can be used to determine the accuracy of the information in their testimony, but existing research using limited measures has not provided a strong basis for informing practice. New advances and the PI's pilot data suggest the potential of this approach can now be realised. A metacognitive cue could be a confidence rating (with high confidence indicating high accuracy), or non-verbal, such as shrugs (indicating low accuracy).

We will test children ages 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11, to advance understanding about metacognitive development and determine which cues could be used to assess the likely accuracy of information. For the first time, we will investigate novel metacognitive cues that are likely to be informative of accuracy in younger children, and employ statistical techniques that allow us separately to measure different elements of performance: their memory accuracy and metacognitive ability.

Moreover, there is a gap between metacognitive research and its use in the real-world. We will address this by creating and testing police officer training to improve their ability to assess the accuracy of information from children, by using children's metacognitive cues. We will also work with legal practitioners and other experts to develop recommendations (for practice, policy, and future research), for assessing child memory evidence worldwide.

Our goal is to impact a range of legal decision-makers who are required to assess child memory accuracy, as well as government agencies, policy-makers, and organisations responsible for child protection and victim advocacy. To ensure outcomes are of practical use to these communities, they will guide the project throughout.