to being manipulated with time, and that false memories of details make their way into memory. One explanation of why false details exist in memories is that people are influenced by life experiences, and they therefore recall memories with insights from other non-related events. Applications Eyewitness testimony in children In legal testimony, the fact that witnesses are under oath does not preclude the occurrence of unintentional false reports: false memory and cryptomnesia present a significant problem in cases of alleged child abuse, in which the principal witness is already at a memory disadvantage. While individual differences exist, it is widely accepted that young children are highly susceptible to leading questioning and biased interviewing techniques, due to their insufficient cognitive development. A wide variety of studies on the subject have revealed that children become more accurate in their recollections with increasing age and their ability to ignore biased questioning practices increases substantially until age 12. As a result, neutral wording is encouraged where a young child's testimony must be relied upon. However, the fallibility of children's memories is a complicated issue: memory does not strictly improve over time, but varies in the number of errors made as different skills are developed. Young children are very prone to suggestibility and false memories, even for false story-situations which they provided themselves. This is likely due to memory compensation strategies of imagery and imagination employed at an early age. As children age, other memory strategies such as auditory rehearsal or use of schemas and semantic relationships replace the reliance on imagery, leading to more reliable memories for events, but also presenting greater opportunity for memory errors. By the time children reach high school, memory strategies such as audial rehearsal, schema formation and semantic relatedness become more common; this presents an increased likelihood for memory errors, such as those seen in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm. Eyewitness testimony in adults As noted, misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes at the time of retrieval. Hence, researchers have applied techniques to minimize misattribution by encouraging individuals to focus on distinctive characteristics, rather than on properties that may elicit the influence of personal attitudes. One important question under consideration, is whether people confuse misleading suggestions and personal attitudes for their real memories of a witnessed event. Moreover, misattribution of memory has been especially well investigated in terms of