The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

Flexible induction is the adaptation of probabilistic inferences to changing problems. Young children’s flexibility was tested in a word-learning task. Children 3 to 6 years old were told 3 novel words for each of several novel objects. Children generalized each word to other objects with the same body shape, the same material, or the same part as the first object. Each word was preceded by a different predicate (i.e., “looks like a …, ” “is made of …, ” or “has a …”) that implies a different attribute (shape, material, or part, respectively). Three-year-olds showed limited use of predicates to infer word meanings, and they used predicates from previous trials to infer the meanings of later words. 4- to 6-year-olds used predicate cues more consistently and made inferences that were implied by the most recent predicate cue. Notably, 3-year-olds performed near ceiling in a control task that eliminated the need to use probabilistic inductive cues (Experiment 3). The results suggest that flexibility develops as a function of (a) sensitivity to between-problem variability and indeterminacy and (b) ability to decontextualize the most recent verbal cue to guide of inductive inferences. The epitome of human reasoning is the ability to solve variable, novel problems while ignoring irrelevant information. This is difficult for adults (Dominowski,

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