Enhancing the cognitive interview with an alternative procedure to witness-compatible questioning: category clustering recall

Abstract

The Cognitive Interview (CI) is one of the most widely studied and used methods to interview witnesses. However, new component techniques for further increasing correct recall are still crucial. We focused on how a new and simpler interview strategy, Category Clustering Recall (CCR), could increase recall in comparison with witness-compatible questioning and tested if a Revised Cognitive Interview (RCI) with CCR instead of witness-compatible questioning and without the change order and change perspective mnemonics would be effective for this purpose. Participants watched a mock robbery video and were interviewed 48 hours later with either the CI or the RCI. Recalled information was classified as either correct, incorrect or confabulation. Although exclusion of the change order and change perspective mnemonics in the RCI group might have caused a slight decrease in recall during the last interview phases, the RCI group generally produced more correct information than the CI group, with a lower number of confabulations. Further analyses revealed CCR was largely responsible for this increase in correct recall. CCR is a very promising interview technique which allowed the interviewer to obtain more detailed information without additional questions and may have, in certain situations, several practical advantages over a questioning phase

The Witness-Aimed First Account (WAFA): A new technique for interviewing autistic witnesses and victims

“…Third, witness-generated segmentation of an event into its component parts is consistent with witness-compatible questioning (e.g., MacDonald, Snook, & Milne, 2017) in that it provides scaffolding for the individual processing styles of autistic (and indeed TD) witnesses (e.g., Pellicano & Burr, 2012) and allows the interviewee to revisit topics in the order that they have first recalled them. Paulo, Albuquerque, and Bull (2016) and Paulo, Albuquerque, Vitorino, and Bull (2017) recently developed an additional component of the CI whereby witnesses are explicitly instructed to organise their episodic recall semantically rather than temporally, on the basis that recalling a crime event in category clusters may be more compatible with an individual witness' mental organisation of the event. Following free recall, witnesses are then instructed to recall everything they can remember, focusing on just one category of information at a time (e.g., objects, locations, people, etc.)…”

“…Following free recall, witnesses are then instructed to recall everything they can remember, focusing on just one category of information at a time (e.g., objects, locations, people, etc.) Whilst category clustering recall has been shown to elicit more correct details from TD witnesses (e.g., Paulo et al, 2016Paulo et al, , 2017Thorley, 2018) the interviewer directs the nature and order of categories to be recalled and it is preceded by unbound free recall, which is problematic for autistic witnesses. The WAFA interview, in contrast, utilises a similar principle of category clustering but these categories are events rather than types of details and are determined by the witness rather than the interviewer at the outset.…”

Enhancing individual and collaborative eyewitness memory with category clustering recall

“…To date, few studies have investigated the costs and benefits of having cowitnesses collaboratively recall a crime shortly after witnessing it. The present study therefore examines these costs and benefits and also considers whether the completeness and accuracy of collaborative eyewitness recall can be maximised using a novel form of retrieval known as Category Clustering Recall (or CCR; see Paulo, Albuquerque, & Bull, 2016;Paulo, Albuquerque, Vitorino & Bull, 2017).…”

“…CCR was recently introduced into the eyewitness memory literature by Paulo and colleagues (Paulo et al, 2016(Paulo et al, , 2017. This new retrieval strategy involves presenting lone eyewitnesses with several crime-relevant category labels, one at a time, and asking them to recall as much information as possible from these categories.…”

“Tell me more about this…”: An examination of the efficacy of follow‐up open questions following an initial account

“…Yet, systematic investigation into witness performance when additional prompts are applied is limited or only incidentally reported across research on the development of investigative interviewing techniques. Research frequently focuses on the reporting of an initial account when testing a specific technique or, when an interviewing protocol with mnemonics and prompts is used, the results refer to the total information output across the entire interview but not within each interviewing phase (although see Memon et al, 1997;Paulo et al, 2013;Paulo, Albuquerque, Vitorino, & Bull, 2017).…”