People who interview young children for criminal investigations and other inquiries could elicit false information through their gestures, particularly if the child is inarticulate, new research shows. "Ours is the first study to show that misleading gesture can have long-term effects on the veracity of children's reports," said psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD, a gesture expert at the University of Chicago [Psychological Science, 5: 623-28].
Interviewers go into sessions with a great deal of information from parents and others. Although they are encouraged to ask open-ended question, they may provide clues through their gestures that encourage children to "remember" things they did not witness, the study found. Gestures by children also can reveal important information that lawyers and police investigators may be missing by not paying attention to hand movements.
"While others have suggested that interviews be videotaped, we suggest the videotaping needs to be arranged so both interviewer and witness are visible on camera," stated Dr. Goldin-Meadow.
"Although it is unrealistic to expect investigators to review videotapes of an entire interview, it should be possible to check videotapes for nonverbal cues whenever a key fact is first mentioned," said lead author Sara Broaders, PhD. "Such procedures are needed to ascertain whether the interviewer or witness first introduces a fact into testimony."
The taping and attention to gesture are important because some of the pivotal information children communicate and pay attention to is conveyed only through gesture. People working on legal cases involving children frequently use written transcripts that do not include information about gesture.
To study the role of gesture in what children witness and later report, the researchers arranged for a professional musician to perform in seven classrooms, playing several instruments, wearing particular items of clothing, and performing actions unrelated to the performance.
A total of 39 students, ages 5-6, were interviewed five times over a 10- to 12-week period. The arrangement was similar to what children experience when they are interviewed as part of a criminal investigation.
The researchers used two sets of questions for four of the interviews, one in which interviewers used no gesture and one in which gesture was included. A fifth interview was open-ended and sought to gather all the information children remembered about what they saw.
The youngsters noticed gesture when it was used and responded by imitating the gesture they saw, the study found. When an interviewer asked a question such as "What was the musician wearing?" with a gesture that indicated a hat, the students frequently said the musician was wearing a hat even though he was not.
"A later interviewer who had access only to a written transcript would not be able to tell that the hat was introduced into the interview by the first interviewer, rather than the child," Dr. Goldin-Meadow said. "Moreover, 71 percent of the details children conveyed in their gestures were never found in their speech. Written transcripts would provide no access to this information at all."
The research was supported with a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
|