The putative confession instruction (“[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth”) during forensic interviews with children has been shown to increase the accuracy of children’s statements, but it is unclear whether adult’s perceptions are sensitive to...

The putative confession (PC) instructions (“[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth”) increases children’s honesty. However, research has shown that children who maintain secrecy despite the PC are more convincing. We examined whether (a) the PC...

Concealment (i.e., omitting information without saying anything untrue) has received little empirical attention relative to falsification (i.e., false statements). This study examined free recall reports among a sample of 349 maltreated and non-maltreated children ages four to nine, and found...

When interviewing a child who may have witnessed a crime, the interviewer must ask carefully directed questions in order to elicit a truthful statement from the child. The presented work uses Granger causal analysis to examine and represent child-interviewer interaction dynamics over such an...

Adults often fail to recognize the ambiguity of children’s unelaborated responses to ‘Do you know/remember (DYK/R) if/whether’ questions. Two studies examined whether sample questions and/or an explicit instruction would improve adults’ ability to recognize referential ambiguity in...

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated...