Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs

Norman Douglas, author of the South Wind (1917), said: “If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.”

In the same way, according to a recent study, there is no truer statement than in legal forensics: adults may have less to teach children in recognizing suspects.

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Granting that the issue of suggestibility is taken care of, four Australian psychologists found support in the confidence placed on children as eyewitnesses.

Researchers Tirta Susilo, Kate Crookes, Elinor McKone and Hannah Turner of the Department of Psychology at the Australian National University (Canberra) established that children can be as accurate in recognizing unfamiliar adult faces compared to adults, and much better to adults in recognizing unfamiliar child faces.

In a report published in PLoS ONE (July 2009 issue), Susilo and her team confirmed from two previous studies, in 2007 and 2009, that children can recognize unfamiliar adult faces as accurately as adults.

After discovering a methodological shortcoming in the Goffaux-Rossion study in 2006 and the Rossion-Boremanse report in 2008, they made mathematical adjustments.

They discovered that the performance of children (19 percent recognition accuracy) does not very far from the Goffaux-Rossion and Rossion-Boremanse reports, at 15 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

They also noted that two studies in 2008 indicated that preschool teachers can recognize unfamiliar child faces far better than ordinary adults. But these teachers were less effective than ordinary adults in recognizing unfamiliar adult faces. (It apparently implies that children can be better eyewitnesses compared to preschool teachers in identifying adult criminals.) In addition to that, children bested adults in recognizing unfamiliar child faces two to one.

There are two important things, however, that children inevitably learn from adults: virtues or the lack thereof.

The New York Times writer Sonia Taitz once wrote in an article in O Magazine (May 2003): “What children take from us, they give. We become people who feel more deeply, question more deeply, hurt more deeply, and love more deeply.” Those are some things that adults must teach.