Child eyewitness testimony: The search for truth and justice in the American way

Subjects in kindergarten, grade 2, and college were shown a videotape of a bicycle theft followed by a one month longitudinal study simulating the witness's experience during the pretrial phase of a criminal prosecutorial workup. Subjects were asked for free recall as well as for responses to nonleading and correct or incorrectly leading questions. Accuracy of free recall was high for all ages. Younger children were more susceptible to suggestive leading questions and adults were found to reject many of the "correctly" leading questions. Differences were found between answers to central and peripheral items and subjects were found to change their answers within the same interview in relation to age of the witness and centrality of the question.