Comparing children's and adults’ accounts of childhood injuries: implications for the courtroom

Adults who allege childhood abuse often provide rich, detailed accounts, and many triers-of-fact treat those details as signs of reliability. Yet equating detail with reliability sits uneasily with what we know about memory. Adults' memories for unusual or traumatic events are typically sparse, detail fades with time, and when adults recall childhood, they draw on memories encoded with immature cognitive tools. Moreover, children themselves seldom report these specific details when interviewed soon after events. If adults later provide more detail about childhood events than children do at the time, the source of that detail becomes uncertain. Across two studies, we asked adults (Studies 1 and 2) and children (Study 2) to recall a childhood injury. During free recall, both groups recalled few legally-relevant details - though adults reported more than children, despite considerable retention intervals. Probing questions narrowed this gap, but adults were more likely than children to answer certain questions, provided more detail in many of their responses, and used verbal hedges and speculative language more frequently. These findings fit with the idea that highly detailed accounts of childhood events likely reflect later reconstruction rather than particularly durable memory - a crucial insight for both autobiographical memory theory and triers-of-fact in the courtroom.