Eyewitness testimony has been a key part of memory research in recent decades, focussing on whether our recollections of events are accurate and reliable enough to be used as evidence to make convictions. Researchers generally agree that memories can easily be altered and certain precautions need to be taken to ensure that an individual’s memory of an event is preserved.
In terms of children and young adults, previous studies have found that memory ability increases with age. In eyewitness style studies, older children generally show more accurate memory than younger children. However, there has been little investigation into the concept of ‘earwitness testimony’. There have been many criminal cases that have relied on environmental sound, one of the most famous being the Oscar Pistorius murder trial. During this trial a neighbour came forward to tell the court that she heard an argument in the house before any gunshots were fired. This type of evidence could have changed the court case from a manslaughter trial to a murder trial.
However, it was also stated that a woman was screaming after the gunshot sounds- this was later proved impossible as the victim had suffered a wound to her head, leaving her unable to produce any noise. With these types of errors made in auditory memory, more research is needed to determine the reliability of auditory memories.
In a study led by Lisa Burrell, published in 2016 by Applied Cognitive Psychology, a younger group of children (ages 7-8), were tested against an older group of children (ages 9- 11) for auditory stimuli that was either emotional or neutral. The emotional event chosen was a car crash, which included auditory sounds that made a clear narrative (car engine starting, honking, crashing, screaming). The neutral event was someone brushing their teeth, again with sounds that indicated a clear narrative (walking along floor, door opening, running water, brushing teeth, spitting).
The study found that the older children recalled all of the events to a greater extent than the younger group of children. Younger children also particularly struggled to recall the items in the correct order. Older children were able to recall the stimuli without cues or probing more than the younger children were able to. Overall, the emotional stimuli were recalled more than the neutral stimuli, regardless of age.
These results are in-line with previous findings that emotional events are remembered more than neutral ones. It is a common finding in memory research that children’s recall can be more easily manipulated than adults, and also that emotional stimuli can often be exaggerated in the individual’s memory. Suggested future directions for this research is to investigate the manipulability of emotional environmental sounds compared to neutral ones, and how this changes with different age cohorts.
