Metamemory and Lineup Selection: Can Children’s Metacognitive Beliefs Influence Lineup Selection?

Abstract

Child eyewitnesses pose a continuous challenge for the criminal justice system. Researchers have made repeated attempts to combat children’s problematic over-choosing from a photographic lineup (e.g., Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1999), but difficulties remain. Although there have been multiple hypotheses put forth that attempt to explain why children struggle with correctly rejecting target-absent lineups (i.e., saying the perpetrator is not there when s/he is not), none have fully explained the reason for children’s error patterns (Dunlevy & Cherryman, 2013; Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1997). One possibility is that children overestimate the accuracy of their own memory. Children often exhibit similar levels of metacognitive abilities as adults; however, children have been repeatedly shown to be overconfident in their lineup decisions (Keast et al., 2007). Assuming appropriate metacognitive function, this overconfidence may be a result of children’s failure to consider factors that could disconfirm their lineup decision, and they may need to be explicitly informed of the complexity of an eyewitness identification. Providing children with such a warning after a lineup identification has been previously shown to result in only a slight reduction in overconfidence (Keast et al., 2007). In the present study, child participants were placed into one of three conditions (control, metacognition, and metacognition + warning) to determine if reflection on metamemory beliefs in combination with a warning on memory fallibility would influence their photographic lineup choosing behaviour. Although there was some indication that those who believed they were generally good at the task chose with a higher frequency, there was no indication that this belief was related to the accuracy of those choices. Those who were choosers were significantly more inaccurate than the non-chooser’s, and overall the instruction manipulations were unsuccessful. More work needs to be done to determine if children’s prospective beliefs on memory can subsequently influence their performance during recognition memory tasks.