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SUMMARY. An experiment was conducted to examine whether the use of different camera shots‐medium or close‐up‐affected the way in which child witnesses were perceived by adult raters. School children were video‐recorded describing an event in which they had participated, and students rated the children s perceived credibility on a number of scales. Type of shot used did not influence perceived credibility in a consistent manner, although it did influence some aspects of a child's credibility when the child's age and/or sex was taken into account. Children seen in medium shot were judged more honest than children seen in close‐up. Age of the child was the most influential factor, with older children generally perceived as more credible than younger children; this effect was particularly noticeable for girls and children seen in medium shot. The relevance of the current study for the testimony of child witnesses is discussed in the light of current and proposed legal reforms.

SUMMARY. This article uses a research study on decisions about children's truth telling to discuss the difficult issues involved in using video‐taped evidence in child abuse cases. The adult raters had to decide whether each child recounting a school trip was telling the truth or had only seen a video recording of the day's events. Raters were just above chance in detecting truth and deception, were better able to detect truth tellers than deceivers, and were more successful in decoding deceptive behaviour presented by boys and younger children. Most accuracy‐confidence relationships were not significant.

AbstractChildren's understanding of properties of the earth was investigated by interviewing Asian and white British classmates aged 4−8 years (N = 167). Two issues were explored: whether they held mental models of the earth (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992) or instead had fragmented knowledge (di Sessa, 1988); and the influence of the children's different cultural backgrounds. Children selected from a set of plastic models and answered forced‐choice questions. Using this methodology, there were no significant differences in the overall performance of Asian and white children after language skills were partialled out. Even young children showed an emerging knowledge of some properties of the earth, but the distributions of their combinations of responses provided no evidence that they had mental models. Instead, these distributions closely resembled those that would be expected if children's knowledge in this domain were fragmented. Possible reasons for the differences between these findings and those of previous research are discussed.