Gilbert, J. A. E., & Fisher, R. P.
Overview
Witnesses are likely to testify repeatedly during a criminal case and sometimes remember events on later tests (police interviews, depositions or in-court testimony) that they did not recall earlier. When this happens, their testimony is likely to be questioned in the courtroom. We examine here witnesses’ later recollection pf previously omitted facts (reminiscence) and specifically how this phenomenon is addressed within the courtroom and within cognitive theory.
The Principle of Varied Retrieval: Recollection will be determined, in part, by the retrieval cue that he or she uses to search through memory.
- If different retrieval cues are used at test 1 and test 2, then different recollections will emerge on each of the two tests.
Participants
168 undergraduate psychology students
Materials
3 minute simulated robbery videotape (training video for police officers)
Unrelated questionnaire
Procedure
- Participants were in groups of 5-8 people
- Participants watched robbery, were given an unrelated questionnaire to distract them, then were given a blank sheet of paper to write down as many things about the robbery as they could remember
- Depending on the experimental condition they were told to:
- Describe the robbery (free recall)
- Instructed to think about the robbery in one of four ways:
- Chronological order
- Reverse order
- Adopt the police officers perspective
- Adopt the robbers perspective
- Told to return in 48 hours
- Participants were then instructed to do one of the previously mentioned ways to think about the robbery
Results
- 98% of the participants provided at least two reminiscent details.
- Changing retrieval cues between test trials significantly increased the amount of reminiscence
- Reminiscence was higher in between-dimension and within-dimension changes than in free recall and repeated cues
- Results show that reminiscence is a natural product of testing people on two occasions
- Observing an instance of reminiscence in a real-world setting should not by itself give rise to concerns of having tainted the witness’s memory or other extraordinary explanations
- Investigative interviewers should use this information and encourage witnesses to recall target events from a variety of dimensions (temporal and spatial) or even to ask witnesses to use the same dimension (temporal) but in different ways (reverse and chronological order)
Presentation by Alyssa Puglia