Interviewing in virtual environments: Towards understanding the impact of rapport-building behaviours and retrieval context on eyewitness memory

Abstract

Given the complexities of episodic memory and necessarily social nature of in-person face-to-face interviews, theoretical and evidence-based techniques for collecting episodic information from witnesses, victims, and survivors champion rapport-building. Rapport is believed to reduce some of the social demands of recalling an experienced event in an interview context, potentially increasing cognitive capacity for remembering. Cognitive and social benefits have also emerged in remote interview contexts with reduced anxiety and social pressure contributing to improved performance. Here, we investigated episodic memory in mock-eyewitness interviews conducted in virtual environments (VE) and in-person face-to-face (FtF), where rapport-building behaviours were either present or absent. Main effects revealed when rapport was present and where interviews were conducted in a VE participants recalled more correct event information, made fewer errors and were more accurate. Moreover, participants in the VE plus rapport-building present condition outperformed participants in all other conditions. Feedback indicated both rapport and environment were important for reducing the social demands of a recall interview, towards supporting effortful remembering. Our results add to the emerging literature on the utility of virtual environments as interview spaces and lend further support to the importance of prosocial behaviours in applied contexts.

Cross cultural verbal cues to deception: truth and lies in first and second language forensic interview contexts

“…Whilst our findings suggest that verifiability, and plausibility may be useful cues to deception, and that generally speaking they appear robust across cultures, how they manifest in absolute terms will vary. It will be interesting to determine if this remains true for cues that are not about information but about other elements of the interaction, such as relational humor ( Hamlin et al, 2020 ) and rapport ( Gabbert et al, 2021 ; Dando C. et al, 2022 ). We might hypothesize, for example, that if a second language person of interest might focus entirely on providing information, the wider facets of interaction suffer, and this may also expose their deception.…”

Real-world implications of aphantasia: episodic recall of eyewitnesses with aphantasia is less complete but no less accurate than typical imagers

“…Additional benefits of Sketch-RC emerge from the task support hypothesis [61] which argues memory performance can be improved when retrieval support is uncomplicated and task appropriate [62][63][64]. Cognitive load can be leveraged by the instructions accompanying a task, which can negatively impact goal-directed performance, here recalling an episode.…”

I helped the interviewer and I liked it: Rapport building and benevolence transfer

“…Furthermore, building rapport has been implicated as an “inoculation” against subsequent misinformation (Kieckhaefer et al, 2014), with a higher amount of accurate information reported by those in the rapport condition compared to those in the control condition, following exposure to post‐event misinformation. Dando et al (2023) found that building rapport remotely in a virtual environment (compared to face‐to‐face) increased the number of correct details recalled, reduced errors, and resulted in higher accuracy rates. Nahouli et al (2021) interviewed mock eyewitnesses with verbal rapport techniques (e.g., using the interviewee's first name; interviewer self‐disclosure) and/or behavioral rapport techniques (e.g., handshake greeting; frequent eye contact).…”