Facing away from the interviewer: Evidence of little benefit to eyewitnesses' memory performance

Averting gaze from another person's face generally improves cognitive performance, yet, little is known about how witnesses' gaze direction affects their recall during investigative interviews. Here, participants witnessed a video-recorded incident, and were interviewed via free recall and closed questions following a short delay. In Experiment 1, participants either faced the interviewer or faced away during the interview. In Experiment 2, alongside this manipulation, the interviewer also either faced the witness or faced away. In Experiment 3, witness gaze direction was manipulated alongside rapport-building. In Experiment 4, the effect of facing away was directly compared with that of eye-closure. Mini meta-analysis of all four experiments showed that the effect of witness gaze direction on memory performance was minimal. Furthermore, neither aversion of interviewer's gaze nor rapport-building magnified this effect. Added to the cumulative literature on eyewitness gaze aversion, these findings afford better estimates of the likely size of these effects.     

Drawings as memory aids: Optimising the drawing method to facilitate young children's recall

There has been supportive evidence of drawing facilitating young children's event recall. The present study investigated whether additional event details are recalled if the interviewer uses interactive questions in response to information children have spontaneously drawn or verbally reported. Eighty 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds were shown a video clip of a novel event and were interviewed the following day. The children were randomly allocated to one of four recall conditions: tell‐only, draw‐and‐tell, interactive draw‐and‐tell and interactive tell‐only. The children's verbal reports were transcribed and scored on four different categories of recall: items (objects and people), actions, colours and sayings. The interactive draw‐and‐tell group recalled more correct information for items compared to the other three recall groups, without any accompanying increase in errors. We propose that drawing increases the opportunity for the interviewer to ask interactive questions, which in turn facilitates children's accurate recall of item information. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Word-list-learning performance in younger and older adults: intra-individual performance variability and false memory

We investigated the word-list-learning performance of younger and older adults over 4 consecutive days at different times of day to study age-related differences in consistency of performance over time and the influence of circadian variation on performance. Eighteen younger (M age, 23.4 years) and 18 older (M age, 73.3 years) men and women participated. The start time of testing alternated between morning and early evening across the 4 days of testing. On each test day, participants learned a different list of 15 unrelated words over four learning trials. As expected, younger adults performed better than older adults on immediate recall, delayed recall, and recognition. Contrary to our expectations, time of day did not significantly influence recall or recognition performance in either the older or younger adults. Older adults did show a greater incidence of false memory (i.e., previously learned list intrusions in free recall and false alarms in recognition) than younger adults. Older adults also exhibited greater intra-individual performance variability on the measures of false memory across test days. This variability was not related to circadian variation. False memory and variability of performance have both been linked to frontal systems dysfunction. The findings presented here are consistent with the notion that changes in cognition with aging in part reflect age-related decline in frontal lobe function.     

Developmental differences in the effects of repeated interviews and interviewer bias on young children's event memory and false reports

The present study investigated developmental differences in the effects of repeated interviews and interviewer bias on children's memory and suggestibility. Three- and 5-year-olds were singly or repeatedly interviewed about a play event by a highly biased or control interviewer. Children interviewed once by the biased interviewer after a long delay made the most errors. Children interviewed repeatedly, regardless of interviewer bias, were more accurate and less likely to falsely claim that they played with a man. In free recall, among children questioned once after a long delay by the biased interviewer, 5-year-olds were more likely than were 3-year-olds to claim falsely that they played with a man. However, in response to direct questions, 3-year-olds were more easily manipulated into implying that they played with him. Findings suggest that interviewer bias is particularly problematic when children's memory has weakened. In contrast, repeated interviews that occur a short time after a to-be-remembered event do not necessarily increase children's errors, even when interviews include misleading questions and interviewer bias. Implications for developmental differences in memory and suggestibility are discussed.     

Word-List-Learning Performance in Younger and Older Adults: Intra-Individual Performance Variability and False Memory

ABSTRACT

We investigated the word-list-learning performance of younger and older adults over 4 consecutive days at different times of day to study age-related differences in consistency of performance over time and the influence of circadian variation on performance. Eighteen younger (M age, 23.4 years) and 18 older (M age, 73.3 years) men and women participated. The start time of testing alternated between morning and early evening across the 4 days of testing. On each test day, participants learned a different list of 15 unrelated words over four learning trials. As expected, younger adults performed better than older adults on immediate recall, delayed recall, and recognition. Contrary to our expectations, time of day did not significantly influence recall or recognition performance in either the older or younger adults. Older adults did show a greater incidence of false memory (i.e., previously learned list intrusions in free recall and false alarms in recognition) than younger adults. Older adults also exhibited greater intra-individual performance variability on the measures of false memory across test days. This variability was not related to circadian variation. False memory and variability of performance have both been linked to frontal systems dysfunction. The findings presented here are consistent with the notion that changes in cognition with aging in part reflect age-related decline in frontal lobe function.     

Forced fabrication versus interviewer suggestions: Differences in false memory depend on how memory is assessed

Many studies show that witnesses can develop false memories for suggested misinformation provided by an interviewer. The forced fabrication effect extends this finding by demonstrating that witnesses can also develop false memories for events they were forced to fabricate themselves. In two experiments we compared the incidence of false memory following forced fabrication and interviewer provided suggestion under various conditions (pre‐test warning/no warning; one‐week/two‐week delay) and type of test (source recognition vs. narrative recall). Whereas interviewer suggestions resulted in more false memories than forced fabrications on source recognition tests when participants overtly resisted fabricating and were warned at test, tests of narrative recall showed the opposite pattern even with pre‐test warnings: Fabrications generated following overt resistance led to more false recall than interviewer provided suggestions. This dissociation between suggestive interview type and test type indicates that predictions about the deleterious consequences of interviews are dependent on the way memory is assessed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trauma memories on trial: is cross-examination a safeguard against distorted analogue traumatic memories?

Trauma memories can feel more disorganised than more mundane memories. That may be problematic in legal contexts. Here we examined: (a) whether that disorganised feeling makes people more susceptible to suggestive questioning during direct examination; and (b) whether cross-examination is the safeguard it is purported to be: that is, we examined whether cross-examination can uncover and correct distorted trauma memories. We showed participants a film depicting a graphic car accident. For some participants, the film unfolded in a temporally disorganised way. We then interviewed participants immediately after the film regarding what they had seen: this ‘direct examination’ included free recall, cued recall and yes/no questions, some of which were misleading. Then, 48 hours later, a second interviewer cross-examined participants. Contrary to our predictions, neither manipulation of the film's temporal organisation, nor participants’ self-reported feelings of event disorganisation significantly affected their accuracy of the film during direct or cross-examination nor their recognition memory of the film. Instead, we found that regardless of whether participants’ memories were distorted by the direct examination, the suggestive nature of the cross-examination introduced sufficient doubt that participants were willing to change their answers. We conclude that traumatic memories are vulnerable to suggestive questioning and, unfortunately, cross-examination is not the legal system's fail-safe corrective influence.     

Interviewer feedback in repeated interviews involving forced confabulation

The effects of confirmatory interviewer feedback on eyewitness testimony following forcibly confabulated and accurate responses to repeated interview questions were investigated in two experiments. The first experiment showed that, relative to neutral feedback, confirmatory feedback provided after a forcibly confabulated response greatly increased the likelihood that participants would provide the same confabulated response when re‐interviewed 2 days later, led participants to report these repeated confabulations with greater speed and fewer expressions of doubt, and increased the prevalence of false memories. Confirmatory interviewer feedback provided following accurate responses appeared to have more modest consequences for consistency and confidence, but ceiling effects provided little opportunity for observing potential effects. A second experiment showed that these effects of confirmatory feedback are of considerable practical significance, in that, regardless of their accuracy, responses that had earlier been reinforced with confirmatory feedback were much more likely to be judged by others as credible. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intoxicated Witnesses: Testing the Validity of the Alcohol Myopia Theory

In an assessment of the Alcohol Myopia Theory (AMT), the effects of alcohol on an eyewitness's recall of high‐salience and low‐salience details were investigated. In a laboratory, Study 1 participants watched a staged videoed theft whilst either sober (control or placebo), above (M_BAC = 0.09%) or below (M_BAC = 0.06%) the UK drink‐drive limit. A week later, a free recall and recognition tests were completed. Intoxication was not found to reduce recall accuracy using either recall task. In Study 2, whilst on a night out, participants watched the videoed theft with high (M_BAC = 0.14%) or low (M_BAC = 0.05%) blood alcohol concentrations (BACs). A week later, the free recall and recognition tests were attempted. High BACs were seen to impair recall when memory was assessed through free recall but not with the recognition test. Neither study found the attention narrowing predicted by AMT using either recall technique, although poor recall for low‐salience details in all groups may have contributed to this result. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indicating when you do not know the answer: The effect of question format and interviewer knowledge on children's ‘don't know’ responses

Children are interviewed in a variety of contexts, for example, in the legal setting and in experimental research. In these situations, it is often very important that children indicate when they do not know the answer to a question, rather than guess. In the present experiment, one hundred and forty‐nine 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds witnessed a staged event in one of two conditions. The interviewer was either present at the event (knowledgeable interviewer) or absent from the event (uninformed interviewer). Children were then interviewed using yes/no questions and wh‐questions. Within each type of question, half were answerable based on the information provided; the other half were not answerable (i. e. the correct answer was ‘don't know’). The children performed consistently well with the answerable questions. With the unanswerable questions, there was an effect of format and interviewer knowledge. Children were more likely correctly to indicate that they did not know the answer to an unanswerable wh‐question than an unanswerable yes/no question. Also, children were more likely correctly to say ‘don't know’ to unanswerable questions when the interviewer had been absent from the event.     

False reports of childhood events in appropriate interviews

The present study employed the "parental misinformation" paradigm to examine whether individuals report false events from their childhood even when they are interviewed in an appropriate manner by a trained interviewer. Each participant was interviewed on three occasions. By the final interview, one participant produced a "full" report, and six participants produced "partial" reports, of childhood events that did not occur. Although participants reported perceiving greater pressure to report the false events than the real events, independent judges' ratings of social pressure in the interviews did not differ as a function of what type of event participants were being asked about. Participants also reported higher confidence in their parents', compared to their own, recall of events from their childhood. False reports were also positively correlated with scores on both the full and the revised versions of the Dissociative Experiences Scale, and negatively correlated with score on the Self-Monitoring scale. These results indicate that, despite being interviewed in an appropriate manner by a trained interviewer, some participants will falsely report events from their childhoods.     

Using unexpected questions to elicit information and cues to deceit in interpreter‐based interviews

We examined whether speech‐related differences between truth tellers and liars are more profound when answering unexpected questions than when answering expected questions. We also examined whether the presence of an interpreter affected these results. In the experiment, 204 participants from the United States (Hispanic participants only), Russia, and the Republic of Korea were interviewed in their native language by a native‐speaking interviewer or by a British interviewer through an interpreter. Truth tellers discussed a trip that they had made during the last 12 months; liars fabricated a story about such a trip. The key dependent variables were the amount of information provided and the proportion of all statements that were complications. The proportion of complications distinguished truth tellers from liars better when answering unexpected than expected questions, but only in interpreter‐absent interviews. The number of details provided did not differ between truth tellers and liars or between interpreter‐absent and interpreter‐present interviews.     

Differences and similarities in event recall and suggestibility between children and adults in Germany and the United States

Children (5-6 year olds, 7-8 year olds, 9-10 year olds) and adults from Germany and the United States were shown a brief video of a theft. One week later, participants were asked to give a free narrative of an observed event (free recall), followed either by sets of misleading or unbiased questions, and finally they were given a three-choice recognition question for each queried item. German participants of all ages had higher levels of correct free recall than did American participants. American adults and 9-10 year olds gave more correct responses to the open-ended unbiased questions than did their German counterparts. Germans of all ages made more correct responses to the misleading questions, whereas national differences, favoring the Germans, for incorrect response to misleading questions were restricted to the 5-6 year olds. National differences were interpreted as reflecting possible differences in strategic abilities, exposure to formal instruction, and the degree to which children experience self-directed, autonomous learning opportunities.     

Personality,time of day and delayed memory for tv news

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of time of day on delayed memory for televised news stories. Three groups received the same sequence of 6 news stories at 09.30, 13.30 and 16.30, respectively. Unexpected tests of free recall, cued recall and recognition were given about 2 hr after news presentation. Results showed that memory performance improved slightly across the day on tests of recall, and significantly so on recognition. Personality differences were also examined. In general, introverts remembered more than extraverts and differences between them were most marked during the late-afternoon session especially on free recall and when minimal cuing was provided. The results support previous time-of-day findings for delayed retention of complex learning materials. Personality differences observed here are consistent with predicted introvert-extravert differences in memory performance predicted by Eysenck's modified action-decrement hypothesis.     

False reports of childhood events in appropriate interviews

The present study employed the “parental misinformation & CloseCurly ” paradigm to examine whether individuals report false events from their childhood even when they are interviewed in an appropriate manner by a trained interviewer. Each participant was interviewed on three occasions. By the final interview, one participant produced a “full & Close Curly ” report, and six participants produced “partial & Close Curly ” reports, of childhood events that did not occur. Although participants reported perceiving greater pressure to report the false events than the real events, independent judges' ratings of social pressure in the interviews did not differ as a function of what type of event participants were being asked about. Participants also reported higher confidence in their parents', compared to their own, recall of events from their childhood. False reports were also positively correlated with scores on both the full and the revised versions of the Dissociative Experiences Scale, and negatively correlated with score on the Self-Monitoring scale. These results indicate that, despite being interviewed in an appropriate manner by a trained interviewer, some participants will falsely report events from their childhoods.     

Perspective Effects on Recall in a Testimony Paradigm

The two present studies examined the influence of perspective instructions given during encoding and retrieval on the recall of a visual event. Participants viewed slides or a film depicting a day in the life of a man. Before viewing the to-be-remembered event, they were instructed to adopt the perspective of an alcoholic vs. an unemployed man vs. no perspective (Experiment 1), or of an unemployed man vs. no perspective (Experiment 2). Participants in the first study were interviewed twice, with the second recall being preceded by either a change perspective instruction or without any specific instruction. In the second study, participants were interviewed using either a cognitive interview (CI) or a CI without the change perspective instruction. Results showed that adopting a perspective during encoding impaired recall performance and failed to demonstrate a significant benefit of the change perspective instruction. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Children's episodic and generic reports of alleged abuse

With the present data, we explored the relations between the language of interviewer questions, children's reports, and case and child characteristics in forensic interviews. Results clearly indicated that the type of questions posed by interviewers—either probing generic or episodic features of an event—was related to the specificity of information reported by children. Further, interviewers appeared to adjust their questioning strategies based on the frequency of the alleged abuse. Children alleging single instances of abuse were asked more episodic questions than those alleging multiple abuses. In contrast, children alleging multiple incidents of abuse were asked a greater proportion of generic questions. Given that investigators often seek forensically relevant episodic information, it is recommended that training for investigators focus on recognition of prompt selection tendencies and developing strategies for posing non‐suggestive, episodically focused questions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing a modified cognitive interview with category clustering recall in Iran

The cognitive interview (CI) has been an effective method for interviewing eyewitnesses often leading to changes in legislation and practice in many countries. This study was the first to employ the CI in Iran and test whether category clustering recall (CCR) was superior to a free recall when incorporated within an investigative interview. A between‐subjects design assigned 66 participants to one of three interview conditions after they watched a mock robbery. The participants were interviewed 48 hr later using either a structured interview (SI), the CI, or a modified cognitive interview (MCI) that replaced free recall with CCR at the first retrieval attempt. Analysis of variance suggests CCR was more effective than free recall and the CI group recalled more information than the SI group, replicating the CI superiority effect. This has implications for law enforcement in Iran and worldwide by suggesting these techniques can be used to enhance recall.     

Dissociating early- and late-selection processes in recall: The mixed blessing of categorized study lists

Two experiments are reported in which we used type-2 signal detection theory to separate the effects of semantic categorization on early- and late-selection processes in free and cued recall. In Experiment 1, participants studied cue–target pairs for which the targets belonged to two, six, or 24 semantic categories, and later the participants were required to recall the targets either with (cued recall) or without (free recall) the studied cues. A confidence rating and a report decision were also required, so that we could compute both forced-report quantity and metacognitive resolution (type-2 discrimination), which served as our estimates of early- and late-selection processes, respectively. Consistent with prior research, having fewer categories enhanced the early-selection process (in performance, two > six > 24 categories). However, in contrast, the late-selection process was impaired (24 > six = two categories). In Experiment 2, encoding of paired associates, for which the targets belonged to either two or 20 semantic categories, was manipulated by having participants either form interactive images or engage in rote repetition. Having fewer categories again was associated with enhanced early selection (two > 20 categories); this effect was greater for rote repetition than for interactive imagery, and greater for free recall than for cued recall. However, late selection again showed the opposite pattern (20 > two categories), even with interactive-imagery encoding, which formed distinctive, individuated memory traces. The results are discussed in terms of early- and late-selection processes in retrieval, as well as overt versus covert recognition.