Harnessing metacognition to assess the accuracy of memory reports from children in the Criminal Justice System

每年，数以百万计的儿童证人，从2岁起，根据他们对世界各地刑事司法系统中事件的记忆提供证据。越来越多的儿童证人，包括受害者，被要求回忆警察在调查期间所经历的事情。这些回忆可以继续作为审判期间的关键证据被重新讲述到法庭上。儿童记忆证据的准确性需要在法律程序的多个阶段进行正确评估，以确保其可靠性：警察根据证词决定他们应该优先考虑哪些调查线索；检察官决定证据是否足够有力，足以指控嫌疑人犯罪；法官决定证据是否足够可靠，允许嫌疑人进入法庭；陪审员决定证据是否足以让嫌疑人接受有罪判决。目前，没有政策或实践指南来评估儿童记忆证据的准确性。国际律师协会的工作清楚地表明，法律从业者认识到缺乏经验指导。有一些指导可以尝试确定一个孩子是否在撒谎。但很少有孩子故意捏造证词，大多数诚实的描述既包含准确的信息，也包含不准确的信息。在没有指导的情况下，法律决策者在很大程度上依靠证人的年龄来决定是否信任记忆证据。这是有问题的。年龄往往不能预测准确性，也不能在个人证词中区分准确和不准确的信息。依赖年龄导致了司法不公：儿童在他们的证词被错误地认为不如成年人的准确后被严重伤害或杀害，无辜的人被错误地定罪并在监狱里度过了数年。我们的项目将决定法律决策者(如警察、检察官、法官、陪审员)如何评估儿童诚实记忆报告中信息的准确性。它将通过研究和利用记忆中一个以前被忽视但至关重要的信息性方面：元认知来做到这一点。元认知是指监控我们自己的记忆是否准确的能力。儿童的元认知线索可以用来确定他们证词中信息的准确性，但现有的研究使用有限的测量方法，并没有为指导实践提供强有力的基础。新的进展和PI的试点数据表明，这种方法的潜力现在可以实现。元认知线索可以是信心等级(高信心表明高准确度)，也可以是非语言的，如耸耸肩(低准确度)。我们将对4-5岁、7-8岁和10-11岁的儿童进行测试，以促进对元认知发展的理解，并确定哪些线索可以用来评估信息的可能准确性。我们将第一次调查可能对幼儿的准确性提供信息的新颖的元认知线索，并使用统计技术来分别测量不同的表现元素：它们的记忆准确性和元认知能力。此外，元认知研究与其在现实世界中的使用之间存在差距。我们将通过创建和测试警官培训来解决这个问题，以提高他们通过使用儿童的元认知线索评估来自儿童的信息的准确性的能力。我们还将与法律从业者和其他专家合作，为评估世界范围内的儿童记忆证据制定建议(用于实践、政策和未来研究)。我们的目标是影响一系列需要评估儿童记忆准确性的法律决策者，以及负责儿童保护和受害者倡导的政府机构、政策制定者和组织。为了确保成果对这些社区具有实际用途，他们将在整个项目中指导该项目。

Each year, millions of child witnesses, from as young as 2 years old, provide evidence based on their memory of events in Criminal Justice Systems around the world. Child witnesses, including victims, are increasingly being asked to remember what they experienced by police officers during an investigation. These recollections can go on to be recounted to a courtroom, as key evidence during a trial.The accuracy of child memory evidence needs to be correctly assessed at multiple stages of the legal process to ensure its reliability: police officers determine which investigatory leads they should prioritise based on testimony; prosecutors decide if the evidence is strong enough to charge the suspect with an offence; judges decide if the evidence is reliable enough to be allowed in the courtroom; and jurors decide whether the evidence warrants the suspect receiving a guilty verdict.Currently, no policy or practice guidance exists to assess the accuracy of children's memory evidence. The PI's work has made it clear that legal practitioners recognise the lack of empirically-informed guidance. Some guidance exists to try to determine if a child is lying. But few children intentionally fabricate testimony, and most honest accounts contain both accurate and inaccurate information. With no guidance, legal decision-makers largely rely on witness age to decide whether to trust memory evidence. This is problematic. Age often does not predict accuracy, and cannot discriminate between accurate and inaccurate information within an individual's testimony. Relying on age has resulted in miscarriages of justice: children have been seriously injured or murdered after their testimony was erroneously deemed to be less accurate than an adult's, and innocent people have been wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.Our project will determine how legal decision-makers (e.g. police officers, prosecutors, judges, jurors) could estimate the accuracy of information in honest memory reports from children. It will do that by investigating and harnessing a previously overlooked, but crucially informative, aspect of memory: metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to monitor when our own memories are accurate or inaccurate.Children's metacognitive cues can be used to determine the accuracy of the information in their testimony, but existing research using limited measures has not provided a strong basis for informing practice. New advances and the PI's pilot data suggest the potential of this approach can now be realised. A metacognitive cue could be a confidence rating (with high confidence indicating high accuracy), or non-verbal, such as shrugs (indicating low accuracy). We will test children ages 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11, to advance understanding about metacognitive development and determine which cues could be used to assess the likely accuracy of information. For the first time, we will investigate novel metacognitive cues that are likely to be informative of accuracy in younger children, and employ statistical techniques that allow us separately to measure different elements of performance: their memory accuracy and metacognitive ability.Moreover, there is a gap between metacognitive research and its use in the real-world. We will address this by creating and testing police officer training to improve their ability to assess the accuracy of information from children, by using children's metacognitive cues. We will also work with legal practitioners and other experts to develop recommendations (for practice, policy, and future research), for assessing child memory evidence worldwide.Our goal is to impact a range of legal decision-makers who are required to assess child memory accuracy, as well as government agencies, policy-makers, and organisations responsible for child protection and victim advocacy. To ensure outcomes are of practical use to these communities, they will guide the project throughout.