Writer Choice/ Eyewitness Testimony

37364Using the GCU library, search for two peer-reviewed journal articles on eyewitness testimony using the search term “memory and eyewitness testimony.” Read the articles, then in 750-1,000 words, do the following:

Briefly summarize the findings from each article.
Based upon the information read, discuss if eyewitness testimony is reliable or unreliable.
Connect your research to a memory theory discussed in Chapter 7 of your textbook. See below…
FILTER THEORY In 1958, the psychologist Donald Broadbent developed filter theory to explain how we selectively attend to the most important information. In this model, attention is like a filter.

When writing in APA style, it is important that your analysis is written in third person. Writing in third person, using support from the article to support your position, helps with clarity and conciseness throughout your paper.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE #1:

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Introduction to this Issue: Children’s Eyewitness
Memory and Testimony in Context
Rakel P. Larson, Ph.D.*, Deborah Goldfarb, JD and
Gail S. Goodman, Ph.D.
Increasingly, children are being called upon to participate in a variety of forensic and
courtroom contexts that affect their welfare (Cashmore, 2014; Head, 2011; U.N. General
Assembly, 1989). Alongside this movement, research on child witnesses and victims has
burgeoned. For this special issue of Behavioral Sciences and the Law, we invited researchers
to share their expertise and contribute current studies about the role of contextual factors
on children’s eyewitness memory and testimony, and related matters. Topics cover a wide
variety of issues pertaining to child witnesses and victims, including the reliability of children’s
testimony, forensic interview techniques, participation in court proceedings, prospective
juror-decision making, delays in prosecution, and religion-related abuse.
To begin this special issue, the first five papers address topics related to children’s
involvement in forensic interviews. Given the rising dependence on children’s reports
in a variety of forensic and legal contexts, the need for evidence-based methods to elicit
sensitive and reliable information from children is clear. Building rapport with children
is one procedure that is recommended by virtually all forensic interview protocols and
best-practice guidelines, including the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (NICHD) Protocol (Lamb, La Rooy, Malloy, & Katz, 2011), the
StepWise Interview (Yuille, Hunter, Joffe, & Zaparniuk, 1993), the Memorandum of
Good Practice (Davies & Westcott, 1999), the child-adapted version of the Cognitive
Interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992), and
the Narrative Elaboration Technique (NET; Saywitz & Camparo, 2013), as part of a
successful interview strategy to reduce children’s anxiety and increase the quality,
quantity, and accuracy of their reports. In our first paper, Saywitz, Larson, Hobbs,
and Wells (pp. 372–389) report on a systematic review of the research literature to
evaluate whether there is a core body of experimental studies with randomized
controlled trials that test the effects of rapport on the reliability of children’s reports.
The paper provides insights into and identifies gaps in the current knowledge base
regarding the effects of rapport-building on children’s memory accuracy and offers
strategies for redefining future research agendas.
Children may be exposed to postevent misinformation before an interview
commences and this inaccurate information may become incorporated into their later
memory reports (see, e.g., Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman & Bruck, 1994). Schaaf,
*Correspondence to: Rakel P. Larson, Department of Psychology, University of California, 1 Shields Avenue,
Davis, California, 95616 USA.

Copyright # 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
Behav. Sci. Law 33: 367–371 (2015)
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/bsl.2196
Bederian-Gardner, and Goodman (pp. 390–406) examine whether explicitly instructing
children to ignore misleading postevent information can help bolster their memory
accuracy. Four- and 6-year-old children engaged in an interactive play event with a researcher
and were then interviewed about the play event after a 2-week delay. As part of
the experimental manipulation, children were exposed to no postevent misinformation between
the two sessions, exposed to misinformation, or exposed to misinformation and
given a logic-of-opposition instruction (i.e., an explicit instruction to ignore information
that they were exposed to after the original play event) before the start of the memory interview.
The results suggest that the accuracy of even very young children’smemory reports can
be improved by providing children with an explicit instruction to ignore misleading
postevent information. The study also provides insights into the sources of malleability in
children’s memory reports and, specifically, the underlying causes of the postevent misinformation
effect.
During the course of a forensic interview, investigators may ask children to disclose
sensitive, embarrassing, or potentially uncomfortable information. Thus, these kinds of
interviews require a level of openness and honesty from children that is not typical in
their everyday interactions with adults. Such requirements may make some witnesses
reluctant to participate in the criminal justice process. For instance, children may
choose not to disclose maltreatment to a forensic interviewer for a variety of reasons
(e.g., fear of retaliation, confusion about what occurred). Indeed, delayed disclosures
are common among child sexual abuse victims (Goodman et al., 2003). Omission of
abuse details during forensic interviews may lead to later memory impairment given
the lack of opportunity for rehearsal. Altering an abuse narrative by self-generating false
details about the event may also influence later recall. Newton and Hobbs (pp. 407–428)
addressed these topics in the third paper in this special issue by using a simulated memory
impairment paradigm with adults to evaluate how rehearsal and altering narrative
details about a child sexual abuse scenario can affect later memory recall. Participants
read a first-person narrative about child sexual abuse, role-played as the child victim,
and were then asked to recall the abuse scenario by either omitting details, confabulating
details, or not changing any details, or they were not asked to recall the story at all.
Approximately 1 week later, participants’ memories for the story were tested. The results
have implications for research regarding the effects of delayed disclosure and false
confabulations on memory impairment.
Children are commonly questioned by forensic investigators and attorneys about
abuse-related conversations, such as what the alleged perpetrator instructed the victim
to do (Lyon & Stolzenberg, 2014; Stolzenberg & Lyon, 2014). In our fourth paper,
Lawson and London (pp. 429–445) assess 8-year-old children’s ability to provide
conversational testimony about a novel event after either a 1-week or 3-week delay.
This paper fills an important gap in extant literature by being one of the first studies
to evaluate children’s memory for dyadic conversations and, specifically, their ability
to recall utterances generated by adults.
Ground rules – that is, instructions provided to children before substantive
questioning – are commonly adopted in forensic interview protocols and best-practice
guidelines (Lamb et al., 2011; Saywitz & Camparo, 2013). These rules are intended
to help children navigate the unique expectations that are present in the forensic interview
context compared with those in children’s typical interactions with adults. For
instance, in a typical adult–child interaction, children are not expected to correct an
adult if the adult makes a mistake, yet this expectation is present in the forensic
368 R. P. Larson et al.
Copyright # 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Behav. Sci. Law 33: 367–371 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/bsl
interview context. In our fifth paper, Danby, Brubacher, Sharman, and Powell
(pp. 446–458) investigate whether providing 5- to 9-year-old children with practice
using three ground rules (i.e., “don’t know,” “don’t understand,” and “correct me”
instructions) led to more spontaneous use of the rules during free recall and
application of the rules at the end of the interview in response to challenge questions.
The results of this study contribute to our understanding of developmental differences
in the ability to apply different kinds of ground rules and the extent to
which practice improves children’s use of rules throughout the course of forensic
interviews.
Our next set of papers follows the logical course of an investigation after forensic
interviewing, namely children’s participation in court proceedings. Research suggests
that facing the accused and being cross-examined are two of the most anxiety-provoking
experiences for children (Goodman et al., 1992; Hobbs et al., 2014; Sas, Austin,
Wolfe, & Hurley, 1991). These specific and other general fears about participating in
the criminal justice process may influence children’s ability to provide sensitive, complete,
and accurate information (Block et al., 2010; Nathanson & Saywitz, 2003) and
may affect their long-term psychological and emotional welfare (Goodman et al.,
1992; Quas et al., 2005). As a response to these concerns, pretrial court preparation
programs have begun to be developed across the world (e.g., Kid’s Court School in
the United States). In our sixth paper, Nathanson and Saywitz (pp. 459–475) evaluate
the effectiveness of one such pretrial preparation program, which includes legal knowledge
education, stress inoculation training, and a mock trial that offers opportunities
for practice using stress reduction strategies and answering questions, on reducing anticipatory
court-related anxiety of 4- to 17-year-olds. This study provides preliminary
evidence that children’s participation in Nathanson and Saywitz’s preparation program
before testifying in court is associated with anxiety reduction.
As previously mentioned, ground rule instructions and the use of rapport are
recommended procedures in most forensic interview protocols and best-practice
guidelines. The extent to which attorneys actually incorporate these recommendations
into practice during direct questioning with children is addressed in the seventh paper.
Ahern, Stolzenberg, and Lyon (pp. 476–492) reviewed transcripts of felony child sexual
abuse cases in Los Angeles county to evaluate the quality and frequency with which
prosecutors deliver key ground rule instructions, build rapport, and rely on open-ended
prompts before the topic of abuse is introduced. The results of the study are important
in illuminating discrepancies between best-practice guidelines and actual implementation
of recommendations in real-world contexts.
The next two papers examine whether innovative techniques and changes in the
courtroom context can bolster witness credibility and potentially influence juror
decision-making. In the study described by Golding, Wasarhaley, Lynch, Lippert,
and Magyarics (pp. 493–507), participants read a trial summary in which a 6- or
15-year-old child accused her stepfather of rape. The trial summary included testimony
from a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE), a registered nurse who was not a
SANE, or no nurse. Mock jurors’ ratings (e.g., sympathy toward the victim, defendant
guilt) were then obtained. McAuliff, Lapin, and Michel (pp. 508–527) assessed whether
the use of support persons (i.e., adults who accompany children testifying or attending
legal proceedings to provide emotional comfort) influence judgments about the credibility
of child witnesses and verdicts. In this study, adults viewed simulated testimony
from an 11-year-old female victim of sexual assault either with a support person sitting
Children’s eyewitness memory 369
Copyright # 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Behav. Sci. Law 33: 367–371 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/bsl
next to her or without. Participants then made judgments regarding the child’s accuracy
and trustworthiness as well as the defendant’s guilt. The results of both of these
studies suggest that factors associated with the courtroom context, such as the presence
or absence of a SANE or support person, may influence jurors’ verdicts and evaluations
of child witness credibility.
Delays in prosecution may result in the decay or distortion of memories.
Additionally, the lack of resolution and continued anticipatory anxiety about testifying
may take a toll on the emotional and psychological well-being of child witnesses
(Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 1995). The next two papers in this special issue address delays
in prosecution. Walsh, Lippert, Goldberg Edelson, and Jones (pp. 528–545) used a
mixed methods approach (i.e., retrospective case file analysis on charges filed between
January 1, 2007 and December, 31, 2008 that were decided by December 31, 2012;
and in-depth interviews) to assess the court culture of three Oregon counties, the length
of time with which it took to resolve felony child sexual abuse cases compared with
other felony cases, and the effect of “churning” (i.e., rescheduling of court cases) on
case resolution time. Connolly, Chong, Coburn, and Lutgens (pp. 546–560) conducted
an archival analysis of child sexual abuse complaints that were heard in criminal courts
in Canada between 1986 and 2012. The researchers compared delayed and timely
complaints and evaluated whether systemic factors (e.g., legal barriers) or intrinsic
factors (e.g., nature of the offense) were associated with delayed prosecutions. Both
of these studies provide important insights into the factors that increase the probability
of delayed prosecution.
To conclude this special issue, the final two papers address contextual factors
concerning child maltreatment through discussion of religion-related abuse cases.
Bottoms, Goodman, Toulou-Shams, Diviak, and Shaver (pp. 561–579) identified 249
cases of religion-related abuse from 86 district attorney offices, social service departments,
and law enforcement agencies. The researchers evaluated characteristics of
the abuse cases (e.g., types of maltreatment, settings in which the abuse or neglect took
place), the characteristics of victims and perpetrators in these cases (e.g., perpetrator
and victim gender, victim age, relationship to the perpetrator, religious affiliation of
the victims and perpetrators), the credibility of the allegations, and case outcomes.
Calkins, Fargo, Jeglic, and Terry (pp. 580–594) investigated the case files of 1,121 North
American Catholic clergy accused of child maltreatment. Guided by a social–ecological
model of violence, researchers evaluated individual-level (e.g., dating history), relationship-
level (e.g., quality of interaction with youth), and community-level (e.g., sought
opportunities to work with youth) risk factors associated with a higher probability of
abuse among clergy. Both the Bottoms et al. and Calkins et al. studies contribute to
our knowledge base of the contexts and circumstances in which religion-related abuse
occurs and provide potential avenues for intervention.
In summary, this special issue offers important insights into the various contexts
in which child maltreatment occurs, is disclosed, and is evaluated and processed
by the legal system. Specifically, the reader will be guided through issues concerning
children’s eyewitness memory and testimony as it related to contexts in which
abuse occurs, to disclosure and early stages of a forensic interview, all the way to
child witnesses’ participation in court proceedings. Taken together, the research
presented here will hopefully further your understanding of the many complex issues
that pertain to child witnesses and victims and inform future research, practice, and
policy.
370 R. P. Larson et al.
Copyright # 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Behav. Sci. Law 33: 367–371 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/bsl
REFERENCES
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(2014). Child maltreatment victims’ attitudes about appearing in dependency and criminal courts. Children
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and psychological implications. Roger Williams University Law Review, 19, 411–450. http://docs.rwu.edu/
rwu_LR/vol19/iss2/5
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Copyright # 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Behav. Sci. Law 33: 367–371 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/bsl
Copyright

***PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE #2:
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Eyewitness Testimony in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review
Katie L. Maras • Dermot M. Bowler
Published online: 10 March 2012
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is estimated
to affect around 1% of the population, and is characterised
by impairments in social interaction, communication, and
behavioural flexibility. A number of risk factors indicate
that individuals with ASD may become victims or witnesses
of crimes. In addition to their social and communication
deficits, people with ASD also have very specific
memory problems, which impacts on their abilities to recall
eyewitnessed events. We begin this review with an overview
of the memory difficulties that are experienced by
individuals with ASD, before discussing the studies that
have specifically examined eyewitness testimony in this
group and the implications for investigative practice.
Finally, we outline related areas that would be particularly
fruitful for future research to explore.
Keywords Autism spectrum disorder Eyewitness
Memory Suggestibility Interviewing Credibility
Introduction
Eyewitness testimony is central to the criminal justice
system, and often includes that given by individuals with
autism spectrum disorder (ASD). People with ASD comprise
approximately 1% of the population (e.g. Baird et al.
2006), however, research identifying a number of ‘risk’
factors, such as social naivety, diminished insight into what
others are thinking (leading to exploitation by others) and
repetitive and stereotyped interests, suggests that they may
be over-represented within the criminal justice system as
victims, witnesses or even perpetrators of crime (e.g.
Browning and Caulfield 2011; Hall et al. 2007; Petersilia
2001; Scragg and Shah 1994; Siponmaa et al. 2001;
Woodbury-Smith et al. 2005). In addition to their potentially
inflated representation in the criminal justice system,
people with ASD also have rather specific memory difficulties
(see Boucher and Bowler 2008). Understanding
their eyewitness capabilities and how best to interview
them is, therefore, essential. This article begins by
reviewing some of the literature on memory in ASD to
consider how the memory difficulties associated with the
disorder might impact on their abilities to recall an eyewitnessed
event, before discussing the research to date that
has examined how such memory impairments actually
translate in eyewitness scenarios (relevant literature searches
were performed using ISI Web of Knowledge and
PsychINFO databases, to December 2011). Finally implications
for policy and future research directions are
discussed.
Memory in ASD
ASD is characterised by impairments in the areas of social
functioning and communication, and by the presence of
stereotypic and repetitive behaviours (American Psychiatric
Association 2000). Consistent evidence has also accumulated
over the last 50 years showing that individuals
with ASD experience specific difficulties with their memory,
impacting on the ways in which they perceive,
understand, interpret, and reconstruct the world around
them. Some have argued that these difficulties may even
account for some of the diversity of behavioural features
K. L. Maras (&) D. M. Bowler
Autism Research Group, Department of Psychology,
City University London, Social Sciences Building,
Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK
e-mail:
123
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
DOI 10.1007/s10803-012-1502-3
that characterise the disorder (see Boucher and Bowler
2008). Individuals with ASD have a unique memory profile,
with peaks and troughs in their abilities. Some memory
processes such as cued recall (e.g. Bennetto et al. 1996),
priming (e.g. Gardiner et al. 2003), recognition (e.g.
Bowler et al. 2008; Minshew and Goldstein 1993;
Minshew and Goldstein 1993) and memory for facts (e.g.
Bowler and Gaigg 2008) are consistently reported to be
intact, whilst others such as source monitoring (e.g. Bowler
et al. 2004) episodic recollection and the recall of personally
experienced events (e.g. Bowler et al. 2007; Russell
and Jarrold 1999) tend be impaired. These memory difficulties
provide empirical and practical motivation for
examining how eyewitnessed events are encoded, stored
and retrieved by individuals with ASD. We next briefly
consider some of the memory processes that are known to
be impaired in ASD, and how these may, theoretically,
affect their eyewitness testimony.
Episodic Memory and Personally Experienced Events
Episodic memory involves engaging in mental time travel
in order to re-experience the spatio-temporal context of the
event in question. Episodes in one’s memory are characterised
by the co-occurrence of elements of experience (e.g.
having dinner in a particular place with a particular friend
at a particular time), and are defined individually by the
specific combination of these attributes that are unique to
that episode. For an episode to be retrieved, its components
need to be marked in such a way that their retrieval is in a
bound unit. Early accounts of memory in ASD suggested
impaired episodic memory in the disorder (e.g. Boucher
1981; Boucher and Warrington 1976) and these accounts
still hold today (see Lind and Bowler 2008 for a review).
For example, Goddard et al. (2007) found that adults with
ASD recalled fewer specific memories from their past than
their matched comparison participants, and took significantly
longer to retrieve the ones that they could remember.
Similarly, over two experiments Bruck et al. (2007)
reported that children with ASD also recalled fewer episodes
from their past, and fewer details than typically
developing children for a previously participated in staged
event.
Findings of impaired episodic recollection in ASD also
indicate that people with the disorder have particular difficulties
retrieving specific events. Indeed, Bowler et al.
(2007) have shown that individuals with ASD place a
greater reliance on ‘knowing’ or semantic memory—which
is relatively unimpaired in ASD (e.g. Crane and Goddard
2008), and are less likely to experience the type of conscious
recollection—known as autonoetic awareness—that
is the hallmark of episodic remembering (Tulving 1985).
As such, when prompted about an event that occurred in
their past people with ASD tend to report knowledge the
event, but fail to demonstrate the autonoetic awareness of
‘reliving’ it in its full spatio-temporal context in a manner
that involves the self as the centre of the experience (see
Lind and Bowler 2008 for a review). Indeed, it has been
argued that these episodic memory impairments reflect a
failure in ASD to use self-involvement to facilitate their
memory (e.g. Crane et al. 2009; Goddard et al. 2007; Klein
et al. 1999; Toichi et al. 2002). This leads to deficits in
recalling events that were personally experienced (e.g.
Hare et al. 2007). For example, in contrast to typical
individuals who are better able to recall events that were
self-performed than events that were performed by another
person, children with ASD have been shown to recall
events that they themselves performed less well than events
that they observed being performed by a peer (e.g. Boucher
and Lewis 1989; Farrant et al. 1998; Russell and Jarrold
1999; but see Lind and Bowler 2009b, and Williams and
Happe´ 2009). These findings suggest that if an individual
with ASD finds themselves as a participant in a crime, be it
as an active witness, victim or perpetrator, they may find it
difficult to recall what happened. Moreover, as we discuss
next, a number of facets of memory that contribute to this
episodic deficit in ASD might also specifically shape the
eyewitness testimony that they provide.
Source Monitoring
As mentioned in the previous section, episodic events
comprise a number of perceptual, temporal, spatial,
semantic and affective elements (Johnson et al. 1993).
These elements need to be linked together at encoding in
order to form a bound coherent representation that makes
that episode distinct from other episodes (Schacter et al.
1998). However, if these components are not sufficiently
bound then source monitoring failures can occur, where
one aspect or feature of the episode is retrieved but without
the context of the rest of the episode. Thus, one may recall
an element of the experience, but not which experience it
was from.
In order to recall a specific experience, one also needs to
be able to access individual elements of the episode to
trigger the broader memory (e.g. Squire 1995). Given that
individuals with ASD often perform poorly on tests of
episodic memory, it comes as no surprise that they also
show source monitoring impairments in a number of areas.
For example, they show impairments in recollecting whether
they had performed an action or generated a word
themselves or whether an experimenter had performed it
(e.g. Farrant et al. 1998; Russell and Jarrold 1999) and in
recalling which of two stimuli were presented more
recently (Bennetto et al. 1996). They also make more
intrusion errors on recall trials on the California Verbal
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697 2683
123
Learning Test (Bennetto et al. 1996) and show source
monitoring failures for the format in which words were
previously presented (Bowler et al. 2004).
Based on these empirical observations of impaired
source memory in ASD one could tentatively predict that
their eyewitness testimony might be affected in a number
of ways. First, if an individual with ASD finds it difficult to
remember where or when they learnt something, they
might be more susceptible to confuse post-event details
that, for example, they heard from a co-witness or read in a
newspaper account, as being details that they actually
witnessed themselves. Second, for the same reason they
might be more suggestible to incorporate into their reports
erroneous details that are gained through leading questions
(that contain misinformation in the form of the desired
answer in the question). Third, if the witness has trouble
remembering where or when they learnt something then
recall of a specific event might be enmeshed with details
from other events. Fourth, if a witness has difficulty pinpointing
the source of their memories they may have difficulty
in recalling a specific episode of an event that has
occurred more than once or is embedded in daily activities,
such as a commute into work. Fifth, they may have difficulty
recalling the temporal order in which details of an
event occurred (e.g. whether the criminal act occurred
before or after the suspect had left the scene). In a criminal
case this can mean the difference between convincing
testimony versus diminished witness credibility.
Task Support Hypothesis
Despite the memory difficulties experienced by individuals
with ASD when tested using unsupported recall procedures
(e.g. Bowler et al. 2008; Smith et al. 2007), an accumulating
body of evidence suggests that they can perform at a
similar level to their typical counterparts if they are provided
with appropriate support during the task. Bowler
et al. (2004) coined the term task support hypothesis to
account for findings from research utilising priming, recognition
and cued recall paradigms showing that such
memories are, at least in individuals without accompanying
severe intellectual disability, implicitly intact in ASD (e.g.
Bennetto et al. 1996; Boucher and Warrington 1976;
Bowler et al. 1997, 2004; Minshew et al. 1992). It has been
suggested that difficulties in deploying flexible strategies to
recall details—caused by impairments in executive functioning
(see Hill 2004 for a review)—mean that there are
fewer strategies available to access the information necessary
to trigger remembering of the event (e.g. Hughes
and Russell 1993). Therefore the provision of more support
for such strategies increases remembering. These findings
are important from an eyewitness perspective because they
suggest that recall impairments in ASD are more related to
retrieval rather than encoding mechanisms, implying that
more supportive retrieval mechanisms may help witnesses
with ASD to recall more.
Memory Organisation and Relational Processing
Recent research has found that whilst individuals with ASD
demonstrate intact or even enhanced item-specific processing,
they experience difficulties in processing relations
among elements of an experience. For example, they
demonstrate difficulties in processing a stimulus in relation
to its context such as the time of day or location (Gaigg
et al. 2008), with recalling items in their correct temporal
order (e.g. Bennetto et al. 1996; Poirier et al. 2011), and
fail to spontaneously use categorical relations among items
to aid their recall (e.g. Hermelin and O’Connor 1967;
Bowler et al. 1997; Volkmar et al. 1996). Recollective
experiences require that information is encoded and stored
in relation to spatial and temporal contextual information
(e.g. Peters et al. 2009), which might explain why individuals
with ASD have problems recollecting episodic
events.
Nevertheless, this item-specific and impaired relational
processing style might actually be a positive feature of the
disorder and enhance their eyewitness testimony if, for
example, they are less susceptible to ‘filling in the gaps’ in
their memory with highly plausible but inaccurate details.
Indeed, Mottron and colleagues have suggested an
enhanced perceptual processing account of ASD (e.g.
Mottron et al. 2006), whereby individuals with ASD have
enhanced low-level processing. A related account is that
individuals with ASD have weak central coherence, where
their superior focus on details is counterbalanced by a
reduced drive to extract overall meaning (see Happe´ and
Frith 2006 for a review). This increased perceptual
expertise might even mean superior eyewitness performance
for small but largely unrelated details that typical
individuals would simply fail to perceive (see also Loth
et al. 2008; Shah and Frith 1983). On the other hand,
findings of diminished relational processing might mean
that witnesses with ASD have difficulty comprehending
and remembering the causal chain of events and relationships
between persons and agents, and the order in which
these details occurred. However, as is the case for other
memory processes and in line with the task support
hypothesis, if more support is provided, individuals with
ASD can exploit the relations amongst items to enhance
their recall to a similar level as that of their typical counterparts.
Indeed, whilst early work demonstrated that
individuals with ASD do not make use of semantic relations
among items to aid their memory recall, when cued
recall, more support for context, or superordinate category
cues are provided their recall is undiminished (e.g. Boucher
2684 J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
123
and Warrington 1976; Gaigg et al. 2008; Minshew et al.
1992). This has important implications for police interviewing
techniques, which we discuss later in this article.
Emotion and Memory
Individuals with ASD demonstrate marked abnormalities in
emotional behaviours and do not process emotional stimuli
such as faces and social scenes in the same way that typical
individuals do (e.g. Norbury et al. 2009; Spezio et al.
2007). It has been argued that that people with ASD are
relatively insensitive and inattentive to their social environment
because of an abnormality of the amygdala—a
limbic structure that plays a central role in responses to
affective or emotionally charged stimuli (e.g. Baron-Cohen
et al. 2000; Schultz 2005). The amygdala is involved in the
modulation of memory consolidation (e.g. Cahill and
McGaugh 1995, 1998; Canli et al. 2000) and in typical
individuals, emotionally arousing events are both better
remembered and forgotten less than neutral, non-arousing
events (Bradley et al. 1992; Burke et al. 1992; Cahill and
McGaugh 1998; Heuer and Reisberg 1990; Kensinger and
Corkin 2003). Despite the role of the amygdala in ASD,
only four empirical studies to date have specifically
examined whether arousing events are also better remembered
by individuals with ASD. Three of these studies have
reported reduced enhancement effects for emotionally
arousing words or visual scenes on memory in this group
(Beversdorf et al. 1998; Deruelle et al. 2008; Gaigg and
Bowler 2008), and the other has reported typical modulation
of arousing words to enhance recall (South et al.
2008). Given these findings, it might be tentatively predicted
that individuals with ASD may not show memory
enhancement effect for, or attenuated forgetting of, emotionally
arousing events. Given that most criminal events
will be, in some part at least, emotionally arousing, this is
an important implication.
Implications of the Memory Profile of ASD
for Eyewitness Testimony
Taking into account the findings on memory in ASD, it is
often the case that two contrasting predictions can be made
as to how individuals with ASD will fare as eyewitnesses.
On the one hand, a number of findings would suggest that
their testimony might be less complete and less accurate
than that of their typical counterparts. Take, for example, a
personally experienced event that involves a strong social
element, and the recall of which requires understanding of
the actions that occurred between people in a specific
temporal order, in addition to being emotionally arousing.
Most ASD researchers would agree that any of these
elements could cause problems in remembering for an
individual with ASD. Indeed, memory difficulties aside,
sensory differences such as heightened sensitivity to noise,
touch and light (e.g. Crane et al. 2009; Dawson and
Watling 2000) might mean that a witness with ASD will
have difficulty screening out sensory stimuli, particularly in
new situations. Therefore if either the witnessed event itself
(at encoding) or the retrieval environment such as the
police suite is noisy, echoes, or has fluorescent or buzzing
strip lighting (as is often the case with police stations), a
witness with ASD may find it difficult to attend to the
speaker and give testimony to the best of their ability.
On the other hand, if an individual with ASD witnesses
an event as part of their obsessive interests and where the
event is non-social in nature (e.g. involving online activities
such as IT fraud), with arbitrary details (as is the case
with a lot of crimes that are briefly witnessed where the
‘bigger picture’ is not always available), they may in fact
make an excellent witness, over and above that of their
typical counterparts. Similarly, if individuals with ASD
rely less on context and follow more of an item-specific
processing style they may be less likely to substitute gaps
in their memory with details that fit with their ‘schemas’
for that type of event. On the same basis they might also be
less susceptible to post-event misinformation, and if they
have a diminished theory of mind then they may not pick
up on the implicit demands of a questioner’s suggestive
questions.
Either way, the specific and distinctive memory profile
of individuals with ASD suggests that they may make a
rather different type of witness than their typical counterparts.
Moreover, if their memories are encoded, stored and/
or retrieved in a different way from those of typical individuals,
the psychological principles on which current
police interviewing techniques are based may simply not
be effective for witnesses with ASD. We now turn our
attention now to work that has specifically examined this.
A summary of these studies can be found in Table 1.
Research on Eyewitness Testimony in ASD
How well do Witnesses with ASD Recall a Previously
Witnessed Event?
Based on the studies that have explored eyewitness recall
in ASD to date, it seems that witnesses with ASD can recall
as much and/or as accurately as their typical counterparts,
if they are interviewed appropriately. McCrory et al. (2007)
used a live classroom event to compare eyewitness recall in
11–14 year-old children with ASD and their IQ-matched
typically developing counterparts. McCrory et al. reported
that whilst the children with ASD freely recalled around
a third less information than the typically developing
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697 2685
123
Table 1 Summary of studies exploring eyewitness testimony in ASD to date, including samples, measures, and main findings
Author Sample Event Interview paradigm/recall
measures
Main findings
McCrory
et al.
(2007)
24 ASD (VIQ = 103) and 27 TD
(VIQ = 102) children;
11–14 years
Live classroom
event with neutral
and socially salient
sub-scenes
Free recall followed by general
and specific questions with
misleading questions at the end
(1 day after event)
Free recall by ASD group less
complete (with fewer gist
elements), but no less accurate
than TD group
No group differences in amount of
new details elicited by
questions, and no group
differences in suggestibility
Bruck
et al.
(2007)
30 ASD (FIQ = 96) and 38 TD
(FIQ = 105); 5–10 years
Staged event (magic
show), where child
was recipient of
some of the magic
activities
Participants given true and false
reminders about event, and
leading and misleading
questions (8 days after event).
Free recall and yes/no questions
asked further 4 days later
Autobiographical memory
questionnaire also administered
in earlier session
ASD group recalled fewer details
from both staged event and
autobiographical questionnaire
No groups differences in errors or
suggestibility to false reminders,
but ASD group more likely to
assent to false control questions
about show. ASD group also less
likely to reject never-before
heard ‘silly’ items on
autobiographical questionnaire
Maras
and
Bowler
(2010)
26 ASD (VIQ = 108) and 26 TD
(VIQ = 112) adults
Video of car park
stabbing incident
viewed on a large
projector screen
Interviewed with either full
cognitive interview or a
comparison structured interview
(30–60 min after event)
No group differences in correct
details reported or accuracy
when interviewed with
Structured Interview. Cognitive
Interview failed to increase
amount of correct details
reported by ASD group, who
were less accurate than TD
group, particularly for person
and action details
Maras
and
Bowler
(2012)
28 ASD (VIQ = 111) and 28 TD
(VIQ = 110) adults
Photographs of
everyday scenes
Context reinstatement instructions
followed by free recall, either in
same or different room in which
photographs were viewed (1 h
after event)
ASD group recalled fewer correct
details and were less accurate
than TD group when
interviewed in different room,
but no group differences when
interviewed in same room. ASD
group impaired on reporting of
person and action details overall
North
et al.
(2008)
26 ASD and 27 TD adults (IQs not
stated but sample excluded
participants with IQ70)
Gudjonsson
Suggestibility
Scales (GSS 2);
Gudjonsson
Compliance Scale
(GCS)
Free recall (immediately and
again after 1 h delay) followed
by misleading questions and
negative feedback on GSS, and
questionnaire measuring
compliance on GCS
No differences between groups on
any of GSS measures (free recall
or suggestibility)
ASD group scored as significantly
more compliant on GCS
Maras
and
Bowler
(2011)
16 ASD (VIQ = 110) and 16 TD
(VIQ = 111) adults
Slide sequence of
photographs of
bank robbery
Exposed to schema-typical and
atypical post-event
misinformation 20 min after
event. Provided written free
recall and answered questions
relating to misinformation
20 min later
Free recall by ASD group less
complete and less accurate than
TD group
Both groups reported more
schema typical than atypical
misinformation, and no group
differences in amount of
misinformation (typical or
atypical) reported
2686 J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
123
children did, they were no less accurate with regards to the
proportion of errors or incorrect details that they reported at
this stage. Nevertheless, the ASD group were significantly
less likely to mention the most salient or gist elements of
the event, indicating that they may be less aware of
information that is socially salient in the context of an
event. However, the use of guided and specific questioning
effectively reduced group differences to the extent that
both groups reported a comparable number of event and
socially salient details.
Similarly, Bruck et al. (2007) reported that children with
ASD recalled fewer details than typically developing
children in response to autobiographical (life event) questions.
In a second experiment, Bruck et al. set up a staged
event in which ASD and typically developing children
participated. Again, the ASD group recalled fewer details
from the staged event than the comparison group. However,
in both experiments the details that they did report
were predominantly accurate. This implies that whilst
children with ASD are more likely to either forget or fail to
retrieve memories of personally experienced events, the
details that they do report are just as accurate as those
reported by typically developing children. Findings from
these studies with children suggest that they are capable of
providing valuable eyewitness testimony, although results
from other studies with adults have reported that witnesses
with ASD make more errors than their typical counterparts
in their free-recall of a previously witnessed event (e.g.
Maras and Bowler 2011; Maras et al. 2012). It is also
important at this point to note that these findings, which are
based on research with high-functioning individuals,
should be interpreted with caution when formulating conclusions
for the wider autism spectrum. Low-functioning
people with ASD, who have accompanying intellectual
disability, will have broader memory difficulties on top of
their ASD-specific memory impairments (Boucher et al.
2008). As a result, these individuals are likely to have
poorer memory of an event. Research has yet to specifically
explore this; therefore, any conclusions that we make
about witnesses with ASD at present can apply only to
high-functioning people with the disorder.
The question arises as to how effective existing police
interviewing techniques are for interviewing witnesses with
ASD. The ‘Cognitive Interview’ (CI) is currently the most
widely recommended research-based police interviewing
technique. However, in practice police officers often feel ill
equipped or under too much time pressure to adequately
apply it (Dando et al. 2008). When it is used appropriately,
it increases the number of correct details reported without
compromising accuracy for most witnesses, including
children, the elderly and typical adults (see Memon et al.
2010 for a review) and increases the reporting of correct
details by witnesses with intellectual disabilities (e.g.
Milne et al. 1999). Despite the substantial amount of
research on the CI with numerous different populations,
only one study to date has explored how effective it is for
witnesses with ASD (Maras and Bowler 2010).
The CI is based on two basic principles of how memory
typically operates; that retrieval of an event will be
enhanced if the context experienced at recall matches that
experienced during encoding (Fisher and Geiselman 1992;
Roediger et al. 1989; Tulving and Thomson 1973), and that
memories are stored as interconnected nodes that provide
multiple retrieval routes (Tulving 1974). On the basis of
these principles the full CI was constructed to comprise
four stages: (a) context reinstatement, (b) imagery-guided
questioning, (c) change the order of recall, and (d) change
the perspective of recall. In context reinstatement witnesses
are encouraged, in a series of verbal instructions by the
interviewer, to mentally reconstruct the external (physical)
and internal (subjective) states that they experienced during
the witnessed event before freely reporting as many details
Table 1 continued
Author Sample Event Interview paradigm/recall
measures
Main findings
Maras
et al.
(2012)
19 ASD (VIQ = 109) and 19 TD
(VIQ = 109) adults
(Experiment 1); 24 ASD
(VIQ = 113) and 24 TD
(VIQ = 111) adults
(Experiment 2)
Arousing or neutral
versions of a
narrated slide
sequence (Exp. 1)
or video clip
(Exp. 2)
Written free recall and forced
choice recognition approx.
12 days later (Exp. 1) and
written free recall immediately,
1-h, and 1-day later (Exp. 2).
Physiological measures of
arousal also taken during
viewing of event
In both experiments, arousing
story versions elicited
heightened physiological
responses and attenuated
forgetting rates (more correct
details) than neutral story
versions, and did so similarly in
both groups
Overall, ASD group freely
recalled more incorrect details
(Exp. 1) and fewer correct
details (Exp. 2) than TD group
Key ASD Autism Spectrum Disorders, TD typically developed comparisons, VIQ Mean Verbal IQ, FIQ Mean Full-Scale IQ
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of the event as possible. Recall of trivial or incomplete
details is encouraged (under the ‘report all’ instruction),
since important facts may be elicited that co-occurred with
seemingly unimportant events (Geiselman et al. 1986).
Context reinstatement is followed by imagery-guided
questioning, in which witnesses are asked open-ended
questions based on what they said during their first free
recall attempt. Further details are elicited by asking witnesses
to summon and describe mental images of the event,
for example focusing on the best image they have of the
victim in order to describe their clothing. For the change
order stage witnesses are then asked to recall the events in a
different order, for example starting with the last thing they
witnessed and working backwards in detail until they
report the first thing they witnessed. Finally, the witness is
asked to recall the event from a different perspective. For
example, from the perspective of another person or imagining
that they were positioned in a different location
(Fisher and Geiselman 1992). All four of these mnemonic
strategies can elicit more detailed descriptions of a recalled
event because witnesses are encouraged to access their
memory through different routes (e.g. Schank and Abelson
1977). The effectiveness of this strategy, however, depends
on how a person stores and retrieves a memory in the firstplace,
and a substantial amount of evidence indicates that
individuals with ASD may do so rather differently than
typical individuals (Bowler and Gaigg 2008).
Maras and Bowler (2010) compared recall performance
of witnesses with ASD and their age- and IQ-matched
typical comparisons under either the CI, or a Structured
Interview, which had four recall attempts so that recall
could be compared to the CI, but without the CI’s cognitive
mnemonics. Encouragingly, the ASD and comparison
groups did not differ in terms of the quantity (number of
correct details) or quality (accuracy) of their reports when
interviewed with a Structured Interview. However, unlike
the comparison group, the CI failed to increase the number
of correct details that they reported, and actually made
them less accurate relative to their typical counterparts, and
this was so across all four stages of the CI. Difficulties with
the change order and change perspective stages were
expected, given that individuals with ASD have welldocumented
difficulties with temporal order memory (e.g.
Bennetto et al. 1996), in adopting a frame of reference
other than their own and on spatial working memory tasks
(Minshew et al. 1999; Morris et al. 1999; Williams et al.
2005, 2006). Moreover, these last two stages of the CI are
rarely used in practice by police officers in any case
(Clarke and Milne 2001; Dando et al. 2008).
What was at first glance surprising considering the task
support hypothesis (Bowler et al. 1997, 2004), was that the
context reinstatement stage was problematic and failed to
elicit an increase in reporting of correct details. The
question then arose of whether this stage is ineffective
because people with ASD fail to encode and bind an event
with its contextual detail in the first place, or whether the
difficulties lie in retrieving it. For example, context reinstatement
is based on the exploitation of the relations
between context and event details to trigger more details
from memory, and individuals with ASD perform poorly
on relational processing tasks (Gaigg et al. 2008). However,
a number of lines of evidence suggest that the
problem that individuals with ASD have with the traditional
context reinstatement procedure is a retrieval one.
For example, they have difficulties with a number of the
cognitive demands of this procedure, including mental time
travel (e.g. Lind and Bowler 2008), following complex
linguistic instructions (e.g. Goldstein et al. 1994), and
integrating these verbal instructions with their visuo-spatial
memory for the event (e.g. Kana et al. 2006). Moreover,
Bowler et al. (2008) reported that whilst ASD participants
failed to make use of context to aid their memory on tests
of recall, on recognition tests they were able to utilise
context words that were presented at study to enhance their
memory performance to a similar degree as typical individuals.
Taken together, these findings suggest that, by
reducing verbal-to-visual integration demands with more
visual support, individuals with ASD may be able to draw
on contextual details of an event to aid their memory.
In a follow-up study Maras and Bowler (2012) tested
this notion by interviewing witnesses with ASD with the
context reinstatement procedure either in a different room
in which they witnessed the event, or in the same room. In
line with the previous study (Maras and Bowler 2010), the
ASD group were significantly less accurate and recalled
fewer correct details than their typical counterparts when
interviewed with the context reinstatement procedure in a
different room from which they witnessed the event. When
they were interviewed with context reinstatement but back
in the same place in which they had witnessed the event,
however, their recall was enhanced to the level of their
typical counterparts, suggesting that they can utilise context
to facilitate their eyewitness recall if more support for
context is provided. This is consistent with an under-connectivity
account of ASD (Just et al. 2004), where difficulties
in ASD are proposed to lie in integrating
information from different domains (e.g. verbal and
visual); the traditional context reinstatement procedure
requires participants to follow a series of verbal instructions
to trigger their visual memory for contextual details
of the event. Moreover, individuals with ASD are thought
to rely more on visual rather than verbal styles of processing,
and use their perceptual representation system to
facilitate their recall (see Ben Shalom 2003). This goes
some way in explaining why the verbal mental context
reinstatement instructions are problematic for people with
2688 J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
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ASD, and has implications for enhancing the quality and
completeness of their eyewitness reports in police interviews.
To say that returning to the scene of the crime
would enhance the recall of witnesses with ASD would be
somewhat of an overstatement, given that this conjecture is
based on one study in a laboratory, but these findings do
provide a platform for future work to build upon, which we
discuss in more detail in the future research directions
section below.
In eyewitness research, particularly that utilising the CI,
each detail that a participant reports is often broken down
into whether it pertains to a person, action, surrounding or
object. A consistent finding across Maras and Bowler
(2010) and Maras and Bowler (2012) is that participants
with ASD report fewer person and action details. This is
not surprising when one considers the social impairments
that characterise ASD, coupled with previous findings of
diminished attention to social cues by individuals with
ASD when observing social situations (e.g. Klin et al.
2002a, b; Norbury et al. 2009). ASD and comparison
participants do not, however, differ in their reporting of
details relating to surroundings and objects. These findings
are again not surprising; individuals with ASD would not
be expected to have difficulty in recalling non-social
aspects of an event, particularly given that these can be
recalled using more of a rote or item-specific strategy. The
practical implications of these findings are that when
relying on an ASD witness’s report for evidence, details
that relate to surroundings and objects are likely to be more
reliable than details that pertain to persons and actions. The
type of interview did not differentially affect the reporting
of these details in Maras and Bowler (2010, 2012), however,
and future work should examine whether there are
more supportive interview techniques that can specifically
help to increase the quantity and accuracy of person and
action details.
How Suggestible are Witnesses with ASD?
Four studies to date have explored suggestibility in ASD,
two with children and two with adults. Following free
recall and specific questioning for a previously witnessed
staged event, McCrory et al. (2007) asked their child participants
a series of leading questions, each of which
entailed an incorrect assumption (e.g. ‘‘what colour was the
man’s scarf?’’ when in fact there was no scarf). McCrory
et al. found no difference between groups for suggestibility
to misleading information. That is, the use of leading
questions increased the reporting of details that did not
occur in line with the suggested answer by witnesses with
ASD, but no more than was the case for the typically
developing children. However, McCrory et al. caution
against generalising these findings regarding comparable
suggestibility between groups to having comparable compliance,
and highlight the importance for further research
to investigate whether individuals with ASD might be more
likely to go along with propositions, whilst not necessarily
accepting them as true.
Bruck et al. (2007) also reported no difference in suggestibility
between ASD and comparison groups of children.
However, in a second experiment where participants
completed an autobiographical questionnaire, Bruck et al.
included three ‘‘silly’’ items (e.g. ‘‘Have you ever helped a
lady find a monkey in the park’’). These were mixed in
with the 12 life event questions in their questionnaire in
order to ascertain that answers were reliable. As expected,
the typically developing children were less suggestible to
the silly questions than to the life event questions. The
ASD children, however, were equally as suggestible to
both types of questions. Bruck et al. have argued that
because the ASD children were only more suggestible than
the typical children for the silly questions, but not for the
12 more plausible life event questions, that this effect does
not simply reflect a greater compliance to leading or suggestive
questioning. Instead, it appears to reflect a constant
pattern of compliance across suggestion type, whether it is
related to what actually happened or not. Thus, whilst the
ASD and typical children were equally as suggestible to
questions that were familiar to what actually happened, the
typically developing children appeared to use their complete
lack of unfamiliarity to never before heard false items
to reject suggestions by the interviewer. By contrast, the
children with ASD failed to use a lack of familiarity to
identify the interviewer’s suggestions as a whole different
version of events, meaning they were as suggestible to
these questions as they were the more plausible questions.
These findings have important implications for legal
questioning in real-life cases whereby children with ASD
may be more susceptible to acquiesce to biased interviewers
who either do not believe the child’s version of
events, or wish to elicit an entirely different version of
events from them in order to defend or acquit a suspect.
Whereas typical individuals appear to be resistant to such
an outright change in versions of events, it is possible that
children with ASD might be more malleable in their
testimony.
In the third study to assess suggestibility in ASD, North
et al. (2008) used the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales
(Gudjonsson 1997) to measure suggestibility and compliance
in high-functioning adults with ASD. North et al.
reported that, in line with McCrory et al. (2007) and Bruck
et al. (2007), the ASD group were no more or less suggestible
to leading questions and negative feedback than
their typical counterparts. However, North et al. did report
that the ASD group scored higher on a compliance questionnaire
than their matched comparison participants,
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697 2689
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which indicates an increased tendency to accede to propositions
put forward by another person, even though privately
they disagree with them. This finding of increased
compliance in ASD is important because it suggests that in
forensic interviewing contexts witnesses or suspects with
ASD might be more prone than typical individuals to
respond compliantly to the requests and demands of the
interviewer, even if they do not actually hold this information
as being true. Moreover, heightened compliance
might also mean greater susceptibility to exploitation by
others, leading to increased victimisation and bowing to
pressure to commit offenses. This has important practical
implications and warrants further examination using more
ecologically valid compliance scenarios.
In the fourth study examining suggestibility in ASD,
Maras and Bowler (2011) explored whether high-functioning
individuals with ASD might actually be less suggestible
to schema-related misinformation effects. Because
individuals with ASD have more of a item-specific processing
style (Gaigg et al. 2008), show reduced generalised
event knowledge (Loveland and Tunali 1993) and are
impaired in their ability to spontaneously generate core
elements defining everyday events, such as going to a
restaurant or the cinema (Volden and Johnston 1999), it
was predicted that they may also be less susceptible to
incorporating schema-typical post-event misinformation
into their subsequent reports than their typical counterparts.
Participants were presented with a mock newspaper extract
about a previously witnessed slide sequence of a bank
robbery. The extract contained some inaccurate items of
misinformation that were either typical (e.g. that a customer
was forced to lie on the floor) or atypical (e.g. that
the robbers held the door open for a customer before
entering the bank) with bank robbery schema. Contrary to
predictions, ASD and comparison witnesses were equally
suggestible, and both groups incorporated more schema
typical than atypical post-event misinformation into their
subsequent reports. This suggests that high-functioning
individuals with ASD do use their existing schemas to aid
their memory, leading them to erroneously report schemaconsistent
but inaccurate details. The ASD group did,
however, recall fewer details and made more errors in their
free recall than the comparison group overall.
From these four existing studies exploring eyewitness
suggestibility in ASD, one might tentatively suggest that
individuals with ASD may freely recall less information
from an event, particularly with regards to gist or social
salience (e.g. McCrory et al. 2007), but that, high-functioning
individuals at least, are no more or less suggestible
than their typical counterparts. Future research would be
valuable in exploring whether these findings still stand for
low-functioning individuals, and when other forms of
suggestive influences are encountered. Given the social
difficulties that characterise ASD it would be interesting to
see if they are as susceptible to co-witness conformity
effects if they discuss the event with a co-witness who
reports a slightly different version of events (e.g. Gabbert
et al. 2003).
Given North et al’s findings of heightened compliance in
ASD, it might also be interesting to explore whether witnesses
with ASD can be made to change their reports as
easily as their typical counterparts are under adversarial
styles of questioning, such as that used in cross-examination
(e.g. Valentine and Maras 2011). There are a number
of factors that might predict that under such circumstances
individuals with ASD would be more suggestible. Executive
functioning impairments and difficulties in following
complex verbal dialogue may mean difficulties for witnesses
with ASD in comprehending the sort of long-winded
multiple part questions with complex syntax that barristers
tend to favour, even when they are questioning witnesses
with intellectual disabilities (e.g. Kebbell et al. 2004). It
may also be difficult for individuals with ASD to comprehend
why they are being challenged on details to which
they know the barrister already knows the answer. Even
higher-functioning individuals who have ‘bootstrapped’ a
theory of mind (e.g. Happe´ 1995) are likely to struggle with
double negative questions (e.g. ‘‘is it not the case that the
weapon was not visible before the attack?’’), and accusatory
styles of questioning for details that they have already
clarified in previous interviews and they know that the
barrister also knows. This would be an interesting area for
future research to explore.
How well do Witnesses with ASD Recall Emotionally
Arousing Events?
As noted in the memory section above, a substantial body
of research shows that ASD is characterised by difficulties
in emotional processing domains (e.g. Dawson et al. 1990;
Hobson 1991; Kamio et al. 2006; Kasari et al. 1990;
Yirmiya et al. 1992). Coupled with findings of reduced
enhancement effects for emotionally arousing words or
visual scenes on memory in ASD (Beversdorf et al. 1998;
Deruelle et al. 2008; Gaigg and Bowler 2008), this suggests
that individuals with ASD may have difficulties recalling a
previously witnessed emotionally arousing event. However,
over two experiments using more dynamic eyewitness
stimuli (a slide sequence with accompanying narrative
in Experiment 1, and a videoed event in Experiment 2),
Maras et al. (2012) found that individuals with ASD
recalled more details from arousing versions of the events
than they did from neutral versions of the same events.
Moreover, in contrast to previous findings with word lists
(Gaigg and Bowler 2008), both ASD and comparison
groups showed attenuated forgetting of the arousing
2690 J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
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versions over a 1-day and 1-week delay, whilst details from
the neutral versions were forgotten more over increasing
delays. Both groups also appeared to demonstrate enhanced
physiological arousal for the arousing over the neutral story
versions, suggesting that the event may have elicited an
orienting response in arousal (with a decrease in heart rate)
and indicating that arousal may typically modulate memory
for individuals with ASD for this type of event. A possible
explanation for the discrepant findings between Gaigg and
Bowler (2008) and Maras et al. (2012) is that the former
used word lists whilst the latter used more dynamic slide
sequence/video stimuli, which may have formed more of
an interesting narrative than lists of unrelated words. This
might have led to more of an orienting response (as
opposed to a defensive response) to the stimuli (see
Christianson 1992 for a review). The implication from this
is that high-functioning individuals with ASD are similarly
affected by arousing events, remembering them equally as
well as their typical counterparts and forgetting them less
than neutral events. However, this conclusion is tentative
given that it is based on the findings from two experiments
in the laboratory. Future work should explore this using
more real-life eyewitness events that are experienced in
real time rather than viewed on a video or in slides. It might
also be worthwhile for future work to vary the valence of
the arousal by comparing memory for positively versus
negatively arousing events, thus manipulating the type of
responses (i.e. orienting, which decreases heart rate compared
to defensive, which increases heart rate) with different
types of eyewitness stimuli.
Implications for Practice
From the rather sparse work that has explored eyewitness
testimony in ASD to date, it seems that high-functioning
witnesses with ASD are capable of providing reliable testimony
and are no more suggestible than their typical
counterparts, but that the currently recommended police
interviewing technique (the CI) is unsuitable for them.
Once additional research has replicated and extended this
work, it will be important to ensure that findings appropriately
inform investigative practice. It has been reported
that police officers often feel that they do not receive
enough training on interviewing even typical witnesses
(ACPO 2004; Clarke and Milne 2001; Dando et al. 2008),
and a number of researchers have expressed concern that
those working within the criminal justice system are illequipped
to respond effectively to those with ASD (e.g.
Allen et al. 2008; Bather et al. 2008; Browning and
Caulfield 2011; Haskins and Silva 2006; Mayes 2003;
Murrie et al. 2002). Browning and Caulfield (2011) argue
that all of those involved in the criminal justice system—
from policy makers, the police, intermediaries, the crown
prosecution service, the judiciary to probationers—need to
receive access to training or have access to trained colleagues
who understand and can meet the needs of witnesses,
victims or suspects with ASD.
With regards to how the police interview witnesses with
ASD, it is one thing to speculate from empirical research
about what specific procedure would work best, but quite
another to implement that procedure when a busy police
officer finds him/herself interviewing a witness with ASD
at short notice. Police forces in England, Wales and
Northern Ireland currently have five levels of investigative
interviewing training ranging from probationers at Tier 1,
uniformed investigators and detectives at Tier 2, specialist
interviewers for vulnerable, intimidated and significant
witnesses, and suspects in major crimes at Tier 3, supervisors
at Tier 4, and interview advisers at Tier 5 who
comprise a small number of skilled interviewers who are
called into assist with the planning of major and/or complex
interviews (ACPO 2001). Somewhere towards Tier 5
investigative interviewers could be more informed about
the specific memory profile of individuals with ASD and
how best to interview them. In conjunction with the UK
charity the National Autistic Society, police forces in
England and Wales have recently introduced the use of an
‘Autism Alert Card’, which individuals with ASD can
carry at all times to alert the police and other emergency
services that they have an ASD. This card will undoubtedly
prove useful in raising awareness of ASD amongst investigative
professionals and ensure that basic communication
is improved, for example by the interviewer asking questions
in simple terms without the use of irony or metaphors.
Whilst tentative implications might be offered from existing
research in terms of appropriate interviewing techniques
for witnesses with ASD (e.g. that the CI should not
be used—see Maras and Bowler 2010, 2012), at present the
relative scarcity of this work means that replication and
extension of these findings are needed to justify firmer
recommendations.
It is of relevance to investigative practice that ASD
often co-occurs with psychiatric or specific clinical conditions
such as anxiety (Gillott et al. 2001), depression (see
Stewart et al. 2006), and Tourette syndrome (Baron-Cohen
et al. 1999). ASD can also co-occur with non-specific
conditions such as speech and language disorders (Rapin
and Dunn 2003), hearing impairments (Rosenhall et al.
1999) and visual impairments (Pring 2005). Research in
ASD generally tends to exclude participants who have
other co-occurring disorders in order to strengthen conclusions
that any difference between groups is due to the
ASD, and not the co-occurring condition or the medication
being taken to treat it. Nevertheless, such stringent participant
selection may be a drawback to the generalisability of
J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697 2691
123
findings to the actual ASD population, of which such
individuals with co-occurring disorders comprise a significant
part (see Mohiuddin et al. 2011). For example,
depression in itself can have consequences for memory
(see Burt et al. 1995, for a meta-analysis), but in addition
an individual with co-occurring depression may also be
taking an antidepressant such as amitriptyline, which can
also produce memory loss (e.g. Spring et al. 1992). Similarly,
visual impairments have obvious implications for
eyewitness performance, and a speech and language disorder
will affect their understanding of questions and
ability to give comprehensible reports in interviews.
Indeed, research that excludes individuals with such
co-occurring disorders may actually over-estimate eyewitness
accuracy. In practice therefore, the whole profile of the
individual in question should be taken into account when
considering which factors are likely to affect their eyewitness
accuracy.
Whilst no research to date has explicitly explored how
the sensory needs of individuals with ASD can be met
during police and judicial procedures, what we know about
the disorder implies that a distraction free environment
together with techniques that avoid that particular individual’s
triggers to fear, anxiety and panic will help the
interview process run more smoothly and ensure the witness
can give evidence more effectively. Indeed, the
National Autistic Society has recently produced guidance
for those working within the criminal system that outlines a
number of the sensory difficulties that people with ASD
often experience and how this might affect their behaviour
in police interviews (National Autistic Society 2011). It is
important that investigators plan interviews ahead to avoid
any sensory ‘triggers’ for witnesses with ASD, for example
ensuring that the interview room is not one with strobe
lighting, and avoiding noisy and crowded areas. It is a
positive step forward that these sensory manifestations are
recognised in the information videos for the Autism Alert
Card that are shown to police officers.
Future Research Directions
Several potentially fruitful directions for future research
have been mentioned throughout this review. There are,
however, a number of particularly pertinent avenues for
future research that we have not yet discussed. Firstly, a
significant limitation of the studies that have explored
eyewitness testimony in ASD to date is that they have
recruited relatively high-functioning participants with
ASD. High-functioning ASD samples are useful starting
points for new research because results reflect the effects
of the disorder in what can be argued as its ‘pure’ form,
rather than being confounded by additional intellectual
impairments. Since approximately 55% of the ASD population
is characterised by developmental delays in global
cognitive functioning with an IQ70 (Baird et al. 2006),
the existing work has serious limitations in its generalisability
to the wider ASD population. A next step will be to
extend the existing findings to lower-functioning individuals
on the autism spectrum. Intellectual disability in itself
has consequences for memory (see Lifshitz et al. 2011, for
a meta-analysis), which means that in addition to the specific
memory difficulties that are associated with the disorder,
lower-functioning witnesses with ASD are also
likely to have broader difficulties in remembering an event.
Moreover, lower-functioning ASD individuals with ASD
often have impaired or delayed language development (see
Boucher et al. 2008), which will undoubtedly affect their
ability to understand and comprehensively answer interview
questions. The CI’s context reinstatement procedure,
for example, which has already been shown to be problematic
for high-functioning individuals with ASD (Maras
and Bowler 2010, 2012), is likely to be particularly difficult
for lower-functioning individuals with language impairments,
given that it requires the ability to follow a series of
verbal instructions in order to reinstate the context.
Research that has examined the abilities of eyewitnesses
with ASD to date has also done so from the assumption that
the individual is a witness to, rather than perpetrator of, the
criminal event. Since findings from several lines of research
suggest that people with ASD can also be responsible for
committing criminal acts (see, e.g. Allen et al. 2008;
Browning and Caulfield 2011; Howlin 1997; Woodbury-
Smith et al. 2005; Woodbury-Smith et al. 2006), future work
is needed to explore how people with ASD who have
actually perpetrated the act behave when asked to testify.
For example, given the difficulties that people with ASD
have in incorporating their concept of the self when recollecting
episodic events (e.g. Crane and Goddard 2008;
Crane et al. 2009; Lind 2010; Lind and Bowler 2009a,
2010), they may struggle to recall such an event where they
played an active causal role, particularly when combined
with the increased interrogative pressure of being questioned
as a suspect.
It might also be fruitful for future work to replicate and
extend the findings from Maras and Bowler (2012), which
showed that whilst the traditional context reinstatement
instructions were problematic for witnesses with ASD,
physically returning to the environmental context enhanced
their recall to a similar level of their typical counterparts. If
the traditional context reinstatement procedure is problematic
because of the language (i.e. verbal) to mental
imagery (i.e. visual) demands, then it is possible that other,
more logistically feasible, interviewing techniques might
help. For example, the use of photographs of contextual
aspects of the scene of the event in combination with the
2692 J Autism Dev Disord (2014) 44:2682–2697
123
traditional verbal instructions might also be effective in
reinstating context and enhancing recall, by reducing verbal-
to-visual integrative demands. Moreover, whilst previous
work indicates that the CI and the context
reinstatement procedure are ineffective for witnesses with
ASD, it will be important to tease apart the exact mechanisms
that contribute to this lack of effectiveness. For
example, an important component of the CI is ‘rapport
building’, yet attempting to build rapport with a witness
who finds small talk difficult may only serve to heighten
their anxiety and impair their performance. Further,
establishing rapport is also based on an interaction between
the interviewer and the interviewee. It may be that people
with ASD find social element of the CI difficult, and if this
is the case then they may benefit from an adapted technique
that removes this social component, such as a Self-
Administered Interview tool (Gabbert et al. 2009), or by
drawing a sketch-plan of the event to supplement and aid
their verbal recall (e.g. Dando et al. 2009). Indeed, given
that people with ASD often show enhanced spatial abilities
(e.g. Caron et al. 2004), drawing the event may prove a
very effective interviewing tool to enhance their recall.
As briefly mentioned earlier, people with ASD have
difficulties with remembering the temporal order of details,
for example with serial recall of word order (e.g. Poirier
et al. 2011) or judging which of two events occurred more
recently (e.g. Bennetto et al. 1996). Whilst they tend to
remember individual items well, they have difficulty in
processing the relations between these items. The coding
schemes used in eyewitness research to date have not
explicitly scored recall for the order in which details are
reported, nor has research utilised questions that specifically
probe how well witnesses with ASD recall complex
sequences of elements of an event. In forensic investigations,
small variations in the sequences of events reported
by a witness can have large implications for the investigation.
If, as would be predicted by previous empirical
work with words and digits, individuals with ASD have
difficulty recalling the temporal order of event details,
there might be appropriate interview strategies that could
help by providing more support with temporally-structured
questions or instructions. For example, Hope et al. (2011)
have recently developed an interview tool in the form of an
actual time line to support witnesses sort the details of an
event into their correct temporal order. This interviewing
tool has been shown to improve temporal order recall by
typical witnesses, and it might also be effective for witnesses
with ASD.
Finally, whilst the development of interviewing techniques
that enhance the eyewitness reports of individuals
with ASD is important in increasing the veracity of their
reports, this will hold little weight if magistrates and jurors
do not perceive the witness to be credible when they come
to provide their evidence in court. Moreover, police officers
may adopt a more aggressive interviewing style
towards a witness who appears dishonest, which could
have a particularly detrimental effect on how a witness
with ASD responds in return. Individuals with ASD exhibit
a number of behaviours that are likely to reduce their
appearance of credibility, including a lack of eye contact
(see Senju and Johnson 2009) and repetitive and stereotyped
body movements (e.g. Gritti et al. 2003; Lewis and
Bodfish 1998). We know from previous work with typical
witnesses, for example, that displays of nervous behaviour
(Bothwell and Jalil 1992) and inappropriate emotions (e.g.
Dahl et al. 2007; Kaufmann et al. 2003) strongly influence
the perceived credibility of the witness. Moreover, whilst
the present article has focussed on the abilities of witnesses
with ASD to produce factually accurate recall, a large body
of research shows that people with ASD also experience
difficulties in organising their narratives (e.g. Losh and
Capps 2003; Loth et al. 2008; Loveland et al. 1990). Previous
work with witnesses with intellectual disabilities has
shown that ratings of credibility are lower if the communication
style of the witness differs from the jury’s
expectations (Schmidt and Brigham 1996). This is crucial
because jurors who do not believe the witness are less
likely to find the defendant guilty (e.g. Bottoms and
Goodman 1994; Myers et al. 1999). It will therefore be
important for future work to examine how the behavioural
manifestations associated with ASD present to jurors,
magistrates and police officers, and to explore whether
educating people on the disorder helps to reduce any such
biases.
To conclude, findings of the capabilities of witnesses
with ASD to date suggest that, high-functioning individuals
at least, are capable of recalling as much and as accurately
from a previously witnessed event as their typical counterparts.
Future work is needed to replicate and extend
these findings, particularly to include lower-functioning
individuals on the wider autism spectrum and to explore
practical interviewing techniques that might be effective in
enhancing their recall. Investigative professionals might
benefit from planning ahead for interviews for witnesses
with ASD in order to optimise the interviewing environment
and interviewing protocol to elicit the most detailed,
yet accurate, testimony from them.
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Brief summary of the findings for each article is clear, concise, and makes connections to current research.
Discussion of if eyewitness testimony is reliable or unreliable is clear, concise, and makes connections to current research.
Thesis is comprehensive and contains the essence of the paper. Thesis statement makes the purpose of the paper clear.
There is a sophisticated construction of paragraphs and transitions. Ideas progress and relate to each other. Paragraph and transition construction guide the reader. Paragraph structure is seamless.
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