Inconsistent findings for the eyes closed effect in children: the implications for interviewing child witnesses

Abstract

A child who alleges that they have been the victim of a crime will be interviewed by police officers. During a police interview it is important that the interviewer obtains the most accurate testimony possible from the child. Previous studies have shown that if children have their eyes closed during an interview they sometimes report more correct information. This paper includes two studies. In Experiment 1 156 children experienced an event and were then questioned about it. Half the children answered with their eyes open and half with their eyes closed. The participants with eyes closed provided more correct information. In Experiment 2 152 children answered questions in different conditions including eyes open and eyes closed conditions. In contrast to Experiment 1 there was no beneficial effect for the eyes closed condition. These inconsistent results are discussed with reference to actual police interviews. It is suggested that until there has been more research into eyes closed procedures caution should be taken in recommending such procedures for police interviews with children.

Effects of distraction on memory and cognition: a commentary

“…Thus the article by Mastroberardino and Vredeveldt (2014) concludes that the recall of visual details benefits from the removal of either visual or auditory distraction. The generality of this conclusion is questioned, however, by the results of studies reported by Kyriakidou et al (2014) . These authors presented Cypriot children aged 6–12 years with a complex visual/auditory event lasting 10 min; the children were then interviewed about what they had experienced, either soon after the event or a week later.…”

“…The picture is complicated by the fact that Kyriakidou et al (2014) found no effects of the EC manipulation in a second experiment, and indeed comment in a footnote that they have carried out 10 similar studies and found a beneficial effect of eye closure in only one case. The authors suggest that finding beneficial effects may depend on other environmental factors such as the length of the interview and how comfortable children are with the interviewer.…”

“…The generality of this conclusion is questioned, however, by the results of studies reported by Kyriakidou et al (2014). These authors presented Cypriot children aged 6–12 years with a complex visual/auditory event lasting 10 min; the children were then interviewed about what they had experienced, either soon after the event or a week later.…”

“…Two interesting questions to pursue in this context are first whether eye contact would be equally disruptive to performance of complex auditory-verbal working memory tasks (e.g., “alpha span,” Craik, 1986 ) and second whether the effects of eye contact are essentially due to an involuntary siphoning off of general processing resources or whether the interference is more specifically affective in nature. It should also be noted that the task used by Buchanan et al (2014) involved online visual processing, and not the retrieval of episodic events as in the studies by Mastroberardino and Vredeveldt (2014) and by Kyriakidou et al (2014) .…”

Reduction of Environmental Distraction to Facilitate Cognitive Performance

“…Hyman et al (2014) explored the impact of talking on the phone on walking behavior, an alltoo-common form of distraction that exemplifies the trade-off between attention to the internal and external worlds discussed by Glenberg (1997). Additionally, two articles investigated the effectiveness of reducing distraction through eye-closure in interviews with child witnesses (Kyriakidou et al, 2014;Mastroberardino and Vredeveldt, 2014).…”