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Developmental Brain change in Children II
The process of brain development is after forward from the occipital lobe (visual) to temporal lobe (sensory, auditory and memory) to parietal lobe (motor, pain, temperature and stress) and finally to frontal lobe (language, reasoning, planning and emotion). and all of these brain regions work together to build up our eyewitness memory. For example, hippocampus is a brain structure (in the media temporal lobe) that links all of the structures with cortical regions around our brain. From this pattern of brain development, it shows that the frontal lobe which manipulates the function of language is the latest developed region in our brain. This undeveloped function of language in young children limits their ability in providing eyewitness testimony even though they have had declarative memory capacity since 3 year-old

In general, infants are born with formed brain system and their brains develop very rapidly at the first three years. The magnitude of a newborn brain is proximal to 400g and continues to grow as 1100g at the age of 3 which is close to the magnitude of an adult brain (1300-1400g). Although infants were born in a formed brain function, their brains are still far away from fully development. The glial cells, which play a vital role in functioning the normal brain function (eg. insulating nerve cells with myelin), keep growing to divide and multiply after birth. The connections of neurons in the brain also continue to develop after birth and become twice as many as adults’ brain at age 2 However, the growth of glial cells and brain connection are not enough for the mature development of our brain. To have a fully developed witness memory, the development of gray matter, white matter, denate gyrus and density of synapses are highly necessary. The volume of white matter is linear increased starts from age 4 to 20, but the cortical gray matter is decreased in parietal, occipital and temporal regions starts from age 4 and keeps changing after age 12. The development of denate gyrus is start to be formed from 12 to 15 months in the hippocampus, which is essential for the formation of declarative memory in eyewitness testimony. After the formation of dentate gyrus of hippocampus, the density of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, which implicates in eyewitness memory, is developed in peak during 15 to 24 months and keep changing until the age of adolescence.

Retroactive Interference
Retroactive interference is one of the interference phenomena encouraged incidental forgetting in which the newly learned information impairs the retrieval of previously learned knowledge, especially for similar and related information. For example, if you have known what is proactive interference and recently learned retroactive interference, the knowledge you learned about retroactive interference has the tendency to impede the retrieval of the knowledge of proactive interference.

Factors influence the retroactive interference

 * Passage of time is unimportant but relevant. Depend on the study of Rugby player by Hitch and Baddeley, the result showed trace decay contributes relatively nonsignificant effect on the retroactive recall.
 * Consolidation of the previously learned knowledge and new information is relevant. If the older learned knowledge is well consolidated in memory, the impeded influence caused by the new encoding is less; inversely, if the new learned information is well-learned than the old knowledge, the interference is greater. In addition, the more the repetition the new encoding training, the more possible for it to become a retroactive interference, especially when the previous acquired knowledge is simply encoded in short-term and working memory, namely low level of consolidation.
 * The similarity between the new learned information and old knowledge is important. When the recently acquired information is phonologically and semantically similar with the known knowledge, the rate of retroactive interference is increased through the similarity caused confusion between the two materials.
 * The encoding processing, retrieval traces and contextual cues of the new learned information play important roles in impairment. The ways that information encoded impair the retrieval performance of that information. The better encoding the better retrieval will be, especially under the circumstance within appropriate retrieval traces and sufficient contextual cues. How to retrieval the encoded information, namely retrieval strategies, is also essential for preventing retrieval from retroactive interference.


 * Source monitoring error is influential. The ability of source monitoring is important for identifying and retrieving a particular source from memory. The failure in binding and tracking the contextual information has an increased impact on the retroactive interference effect.
 * Personal experience and realistic memories including personal meaningful experience is attributed.The schematic knowledge in memory is useful in forming expectations and drawing inferences for understanding, but it is also able to cause distortion and interference when the encoding information is inconsistent with what have been stored in memory. Meanwhile, the level of extent knowledge stored in mind has impacts on the accuracy of the encoding and storing of information. Knowing a lot about a subject helps to improve the accuracy of other subjects which are relative to this well-known subject. The lack of essential experience interfere the processes of learned knowledge and increases the risk of retroactive interference during a newly learning within related traces.
 * Memory capacity involves the state of maturity and plasticity of brain prominently impairs the memory performance especially the interferential impairment. The development of brain function has a great influence on memory capacity which is responsible for the performance of memory including verbal expression, object recognition, and source monitoring etc.

Effects of retroactive interference in both children and adolescents’ eyewitnesses

 * In children, their memory capacity, source monitoring ability, and language development are limited by the immaturity of their brain function. These limitations enhance the effect of retroactive interference on the accuracy of eyewitness. For instance, a 5-year-old child is generally able to tell the genital contact of a sexual abuse perpetrator which is personally meaningful for him//her, but it is difficult for this child to identify other features such as face and dressing of this perpetrator by using their underdeveloped memory capacity. In addition, the undeveloped conceptual functions of children’s brain, restrict their capacities in object recognition, social cognition, language, and human capacity (remember the past and imagine the future), have massive impairment on the retrieval and accuracy of their eyewitness memory. Due to the young age, children have less personal experience and reality memory than other age groups such as adults to against impairments from retroactive interference. Therefore, when they are as a witness in a crime scene, it is less possible for them to encode and store the features of the criminal in an appropriate or sufficient way in which is latterly able to impede the accuracy of the eyewitness retrieval.


 * Unlike children, adolescents generally have better development of brain function. Their memory capacity, source monitoring ability, language development and conceptual function are developed as closed to mature and plastic as adults allowed them to discourage the effect of retroactive interference during the eyewitness retrieval. The accuracy that adolescents provide for eyewitness testimony on average is higher than children within their brain capacity, but their eyewitness testimony are influence by the expanded experience they have had in violating the criminal source monitoring. For instance, adolescents are able to accept more information when they are in the crime scene as a witness by the prior experience they have. However, it is difficult for them to be unbiased within their prior personal or to get rid of the interference of other similar information when they are in front of the lineup to recognize and report their eyewitness memory. If their eyewitness memory is obstructed by the lineup information, they might selectively report the one who has most of the familiar or obvious features matched with the availability among their memory traces as the criminal.
 * By considering the situations with both children and adolescences, the fact indicates that all of these factors influenced the magnitudes of retroactive interference are consistent in impairing the accuracy of eyewitness memory.

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