A four-way split-plot design was used to investigate the effect on eyewitness accuracy of the nature of the witnessed incident (violent, nonviolent), mode of initial questioning (narrative, interrogative), sex of witness, and type of information probed (actions, descriptions). Groups of six male or six female nonpsychology undergraduates were each randomly assigned to one of the resulting eight conditions. Leading questions, personality and accuracy, and confidence ratings were also examined. Accuracy was poorer under the violent condition, and females performed more poorly than males in this condition. Actions were better recalled than descriptions. Although type of initial questioning had no effect on later accuracy, subjects were misled by leading questions. No relationship was found between either personality and accuracy or confidence in correctness and objective accuracy. Implications for police procedure are indicated.Although our awareness of the factors that can potentially influence eyewitness testimony is fairly comprehensive (see Buckhout, 1974Buckhout, , 1977Clifford & Bull, 1978), our knowledge of how these factors interact is extremely scant. Unless and until such interactive effects are studied, the information that law enforcement agencies receive from psychologists will be essentially incomplete.As an example of incomplete information, one question for which there is at the moment no answer is whether all types of criminal incident are recalled with equal accuracy. It could be argued that crimes range along a continuum of emotionality or arousal and that the recall abilities of witnesses to such different incidents may closely parallel that continuum. Support for this speculation comes from a survey of 100 cases on police files by Kuehn (1974), in which he found that the type of crime was a significant factor in completeness of report. Victims of robberies provided a significantly fuller report of their assailant than did rape or assault victims. Although a number of possible explanations of this finding Requests for reprints should be sent to
Children's understanding of properties of the earth was investigated by interviewing Asian and white British classmates aged 4−8 years (N = 167). Two issues were explored: whether they held mental models of the earth (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992) or instead had fragmented knowledge (di Sessa, 1988); and the influence of the children's different cultural backgrounds. Children selected from a set of plastic models and answered forced‐choice questions. Using this methodology, there were no significant differences in the overall performance of Asian and white children after language skills were partialled out. Even young children showed an emerging knowledge of some properties of the earth, but the distributions of their combinations of responses provided no evidence that they had mental models. Instead, these distributions closely resembled those that would be expected if children's knowledge in this domain were fragmented. Possible reasons for the differences between these findings and those of previous research are discussed.
This study examined whether a cognitive interview (CI) can counteract the effects of suggestive interviews involving forced fabrication. College students witnessed a filmed event and were later forced to fabricate answers to misleading questions about the event. All witnesses were interviewed with a non-leading CI or free recall (FR) either before or after the forced fabrication phase. A week later participants completed a recognition and source monitoring (SM) test of video content. Relative to FR, the CI administered before the forced fabrication interview increased reports of correct details and reduced false assents to fabricated items. A CI after resulted in false memory rates comparable to the FR group. Early interviews using CI techniques may protect against memory loss and misinformation effects.
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