In this study, we examined the influence of initial question difficulty on the confidence in the answers to subsequent questions, affecting the tendency of eyewitnesses to report them. Target questions of intermediate difficulty about event details were preceded by either difficult or easy questions. In contrast to forced-report performance, free-report performance was affected by initial question difficulty: When preceded by difficult questions, more answers to the target questions were confidently held and hence were more likely to be reported, yielding a larger quantity of correct reported answers. These findings demonstrate how changes in subjective experience, as a result of initial question difficulty, can influence metacognitive monitoring and control, thereby affecting free-report eyewitness memory performance. From an applied perspective, our findings suggest that preceding questions about a witnessed event by relatively difficult as opposed to relatively easy questions can yield more event information from eyewitnesses, resulting in more complete eyewitness reports.

Innocent suspects interviewed by a guilt‐presumptive versus innocence‐presumptive or neutral interviewer may tend more to display non‐verbal behaviours which neutral judges consider indicative of guilt. We examined the effects of interviewer's presumption of guilt on innocent mock suspects' alibis. Participants (N = 90) provided an alibi to convince an interviewer of their innocence of a theft after she implied that she believed that they were guilty or innocent or that she had no belief about their veracity. On the basis of existing conflicting findings for suspects' verbal behaviour during accusatory interviews, we predicted that alibis in the guilt‐belief condition would contain the highest or lowest number of correct details with overall higher or poorer accuracy rates, respectively. Although participants perceived the interviewer's presumptive approach, the number of correct details provided and accuracy rates of alibis did not differ significantly between conditions. We propose explanations to these findings and future research paths.

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During police interviews, innocent suspects may provide unconvincing alibis due to impaired memory processes or guilt-presumptive behaviour on behalf of the interviewer. Consequently, innocent suspects may be prosecuted and tried in court, where lay people who serve jury duty will assess their alibi’s credibility. To examine lay people’s beliefs and knowledge regarding suspect alibis, and specifically about such factors that may hamper innocent suspects’ ability to provide convincing alibis, we administered an eight-question questionnaire across the United Kingdom ( n = 96), Israel ( n = 124), and Sweden ( n = 123). Participants did not tend to believe that innocent suspects’ alibis might inadvertently include incorrect details, but acknowledged that impaired memory processes may cause this. Additionally, most participants believed that a presumption of guilt can affect how interviewers interview suspects. The findings suggest that lay people who may serve jury duty hold some mistaken beliefs regarding alibi provision by suspects.

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