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.

This research is designed to build capacity to develop evidenced-based policy and practice guidance to assess the accuracy of memory evidence from children in the CJS. To deliver this, the following impact objectives will be met:

1. By April 2022 pilot test the efficacy of metacognitive cue training on police officers' abilities to assess the accuracy of children's statements, as a test of whether children's metacognitive cues can be harnessed by the CJS to estimate memory accuracy.
2. By August 2022 co-develop, with stakeholders, recommendations for methods that legal decision-makers in England and Wales and internationally could use to assess the accuracy of children's memory evidence, and what further activities are needed to test or implement the recommendations.
3. Increase the general public's awareness and understanding about the accuracy of memory reports from children of different ages (in a society where children's memory reports are often untrusted), leading to better legal and welfare outcomes for children, including witnesses.

By meeting these objectives, this research will benefit 4 groups:
-Legal practitioners and decision-makers who assess the accuracy of children's statements (e.g. police, prosecutors, judiciary, jurors, social workers, intermediaries). They receive little, if any, evidence-based guidance (see below).

-Government law enforcement agencies and policy-makers (e.g. National Crime Agency, College of Policing, Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), National Police Chiefs' Council, Judicial College). Evidence-based practice has been shown to improve agencies' efficiency, reduce costs (psychological, economical), and increase public trust.

-Organisations and charities responsible for child protection and victim advocacy (e.g. SAFE!, NSPCC, Victim Support). Evidence-based guidance would improve children's access to justice and limit retraumatising children in the justice process, in accordance with UN legislation.

-The public (e.g. child witnesses, guardians). There is widespread belief that child memory is unreliable. Better estimation of accuracy, will result in more appropriate use of child memory evidence, and better legal and welfare outcomes for witnesses.

The PI and her contacts in the 4 groups deemed police training to be key area for impact because (a) early correct assessment by officers could infiltrate the case processing pathway, and (b) the relative ease and scale on which training could be delivered to investigators. Training (created in Work Package 2) could help officers prioritise lines of enquiry, saving money and enhancing evidence collection. Depending on findings, there are other areas for impact in the longer term:

-Prosecutors decide if there is realistic prospect of conviction, considering evidence accuracy. Currently, the CPS may drop cases with children providing accurate testimony, or proceed with cases that collapse because a child's evidence is later ruled inadmissible by a judge. Findings could contribute to guidelines for determining if the evidentiary threshold is met in cases involving child witnesses.

-Judges decide if evidence is sufficiently robust using Common Law Rules. Currently, broad definitions of admissibility are applied (many children give evidence). Findings could improve use of rules (e.g. Evidence Fairness, Witness Competence) and admissibility decisions. Findings could also improve jury directions on weighting child evidence. Many appeals worldwide are due to the potentially biasing content of judicial instruction about child memory.

-Intermediaries assess and assist children to give their best evidence. Evidence on intermediary impacts are scarce. Findings could inform intermediary assessment.

-Expert witnesses educate jurors on specialist topics. Findings could inform expert evidence worldwide. Expert evidence on witness memory is rare in UK courts but routine in other adversarial systems (e.g. California, US).