This research examined the performance of 80 children aged 9-12 years with either a mild and moderate intellectual disability when recalling an innocuous event that was staged in their school. The children actively participated in a 30-min magic show, which included 21 specific target items. The first interview (held 3 days after the magic show) provided false and true biasing information about these 21 items. The second interview (held the following day) was designed to elicit the children's recall of the target details using the least number of specific prompts possible. The children's performance was compared with that of 2 control groups; a group of mainstream children matched for mental age and a group of mainstream children matched for chronological age. Overall, this study showed that children with either a mild or moderate intellectual disability can provide accurate and highly specific event-related information. However, their recall is less complete and less clear in response to free-narrative prompts and less accurate in response to specific questions when compared to both the mainstream age-matched groups. The implications of the findings for legal professionals and researchers are discussed.

Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society (14%). The higher rate of these latter two negative strategies among caregivers is also highlighted when considering the proportion of interviewers in each interviewer category who used each of the prompts at least once. No police officer criticized the child, only 4% stated that there is more to tell and only 7% disputed information recalled by the child or asked the child if they were sure about their response. In contrast, 39% of caregivers criticized the child on at least one occasion during the interview, 32% stated there must be more to tell and 46% either disputed information recalled by the child or asked the child if they were sure about their response.Police interviewers' responses when target items were not reported in context Within the police interviews, children provided a total of 46 specific target details that were not described in context (M ¼ 1:64, SD ¼ 1:39). Police were found to follow-up 61% of these details at some point in the interview, using a total of 75 prompts (M ¼ 2:68, SD ¼ 4:76). Of the possible types of prompts available to elicit the information, the majority (59%) were specific cued-recall prompts (e.g. who, what, when, where or how questions). For the remaining follow-up prompts, 20% were closed questions, 17% were open-question prompts and on 4% of occasions a clarification prompt was used (e.g. 'I'm sorry, you said something about a Boo, what were you saying?'). Of those specific items that were followed-up, on only 9 (31%) of the occasions did children actually provide the specific contextual information.