The Interaction Between Children's Developmental Capabilities and the Courtroom Environment: The Impact on Testimonial Competency

Figure 1 : Factors which influence the testimonial performance of child witnesses

Figure 1 is a diagram which illustrates factors that influence the testimonial performance of child witnesses. There are three boxes on the left of the diagram which is the starting point. The box at the top represents “child’s age and development at time of incident” and the box at the bottom represents the “nature of the incidence to be remembered”. Both boxes have an arrow linking to the middle box which represents “encoding and storage”. An arrow from this middle box links to a box on the right which represents “disclosure”. Disclosure is the result of “quality of investigative interview” and “post-incident information”. The disclosure box is linked by an arrow to a box on the far right which represents “memory retrieval in court” and then linked to the final box on the right which represents “overall testimonial performance”. All boxes are linked by an arrow to the “memory retrieval in court” on the far right, therefore all the elements on the left have an impact on memory retrieval in court. Two independent boxes (not linked to any other boxes in the diagram) in the middle of the diagram representing “nature of court experience court preparation” and “child witness age, development and emotional state at time of court hearing” are linked to the “memory retrieval in court” box as well as the final box on the right “overall testimonial performance”. The distance between the boxes on the left and the right represents the time frame, i.e. more time goes by between encoding of the incident and the time the memory is retrieved in court, while less time goes by between the time of disclosure and memory retrieval in court.