Two experiments tested the proposition that postevent questioning can lead to later increases in witness confidence without corresponding changes in witness accuracy. After a staged interruption in a college classroom, participants were questioned about the event 5 times over 5 weeks in Experiment 1 (n = 57) and 3 times over 5 days in Experiment 2 (n = 79). During the final questioning session, the participant-witnesses consistently reported higher levels of confidence for those items that had been subject to repeated postevent questioning than for those items that were asked for the first time, yet there was no difference in the accuracy of the responses to the two sets of items. Additionally, in all conditions the participant-witnesses were generally overconfident in their responses. These results suggest that repeated postevent questioning can cause eyewitnesses' subsequent confidence estimates to be "artificially" inflated.

This article identifies difficulties that can arise during sexual abuse interviews in child protection agencies. Practical recommendations are offered to interviewers, trainers, and child protection administrators. The authors suggest ways to improve the interview process and the interview environment, emphasizing the need to improve rapport building, increase the use of open-ended questions, eliminate unnecessary procedures, enhance the physical environment, facilitate documentation through the use of tapes and transcripts, and train and supervise interviewers.

To understand more about what laypeople think they “know” about eyewitness testimony, 276 jury‐eligible university students were asked to indicate what factors they believe affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. In contrast to the large proportion of eyewitness‐memory research that concerns system variables, the lay respondents overwhelmingly generated factors related to estimator variables, while system‐variable factors such as police questioning and identification procedures were rarely mentioned. Respondents also reported that their own common sense and everyday life experiences were their most important sources of information about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Not only do these results clarify the need for further research on the lay perspective of eyewitness testimony, but they also provide some insight into the way in which many jurors might approach cases involving eyewitness evidence.

Three face-recognition experiments examined how instructions for a recognition test (e.g., emphasize speed or emphasize accuracy) can impact the confidence-response time relationship for episodic memory reports. In all 3 experiments, the confidence-response time correlation was smaller when participants were told to speed up their responding rate, which suggests that participants in these conditions relied less on the artificially compressed response times in forming their confidence judgments than they would under "normal" circumstances. Also, recognition practice before the final memory test eliminated the effect of the recognition instruction manipulation. These results support J. S. Shaw's (1996) suggestion that witnesses rely in part on the fluency of their memory reports when generating confidence judgments, and these findings have important implications for understanding the relationships among witness confidence, accuracy, and response time.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of participants' free-hand drawings on recognition accuracy and confidence for targets presented in a standard recognition paradigm and a lineup identification task. For both experiments, drawing a target influenced recognition accuracy and the confidence-accuracy correlation. In Experiment 1, the confidence-accuracy correlation was higher for participants completing a drawing than controls. Experiment 2 examined the drawings in relation to participants' decision to choose from the lineups. Once choosing was statistically controlled, the confidence-accuracy correlation for drawers was not higher than controls. These results suggest that the drawing influences the confidence-accuracy correlation by decreasing the likelighood of erroneously rejecting a target-present lineup.