To know where the bodies are buried: The use of the cognitive interview in an environmental scale spatial memory retrieval task

Missing body homicide cases have gained public interest globally due to some high-profile cases. In many of these cases, the task of locating the victim's remains relies on the information investigators can gain through the interviewing of willing suspects. To date, investigative interviewing research has largely focused on the retrieval of episodic memory (events) without focusing on spatial memory, a prominent cognitive task required in locating a victim's remains. The current experiment tests the enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) against a free recall strategy in a mock homicide scenario where participants are required to hide and retrieve an object in a natural bushland setting. The results showed that those in the ECI condition produced more coarse- and fine-grained details of landmarks and their actions at and journeying to the deposition site. This demonstrates the value of using the ECI in generating more valuable information to assist in successive search attempts.     

How a maximizing orientation affects trade-offs between desirability and feasibility: The role of outcome- versus process-focused decision making

This research examines how maximizers make decisions when they must trade-off between desirability and feasibility attributes. Across four studies, we demonstrate that maximizers tend to prefer choices offering more desirability to those offering more feasibility and respond more favorably to a product's advertising when it highlights desirability more than feasibility attributes. Furthermore, we show that maximizers' focus on outcomes rather than processes drives their preference for desirability, such that changing from an outcome to a process focus can redirect their interest from desirability to feasibility. By contrast, satisficers do not prefer products higher in desirability to those higher in feasibility and are not more receptive to ads highlighting desirability attributes. Furthermore, because satisficers may focus on both the outcome and the process, priming either one is redundant and does not alter their preference for desirability or feasibility.     

Effects of gender marking in pronominal coindexation.

The naming latency of a pronoun was measured when a single previously presented name in a discourse either agreed or did not agree with the pronoun in gender and person. An effect of agreement was found both under conditions in which subjects were likely to have engaged in strategic processing of the pronoun (Experiment 1) and under conditions in which this was unlikely (Experiment 3). The effect of gender agreement was also investigated when two noun phrases were present in the discourse. The results continued to show an immediate effect of gender agreement (naming latencies increased when a pronoun did not agree with one of two previously presented nouns) under experimental conditions likely to engender strategic processing (Experiment 2). This last effect was not significant under experimental conditions that were not likely to engender strategic processing (Experiment 3). The results are discussed in terms of models of the process of identifying the referent of a pronoun in a discourse.