The effect of a prior cognitive interview on children's acceptance of misinformation

Abstract

This research examined whether a Cognitive interview facilitates correct recall in children aged 4 to 5 and 9 to 10 years, and whether a Cognitive interview given before post-event misinformation reduces children's reporting of suggestions on subsequent memory tests. Children were presented with an event followed the next day by a Cognitive or a Memorandum interview. Children were then read a post-event summary containing misleading suggestions. The next day all children were given both standard test and modified forced-choice cued-recall tests. The free recall phase of the Cognitive interview elicited the greatest number of correct details. Age differences were found such that 9-to 10-year-old children's reports were more accurate and more complete than those of the 4-to 5-year-olds. More correct person, action and object details were reported in a Cognitive interview. Misinformation effects were found in both age groups on the standard test whereas on the modified test such an effect was only found in the 4-to 5-year-olds. Children's reporting of suggestions was unaffected by prior interview.

In My Shoes – Validation of a computer assisted approach for interviewing children

“…The results showed that the IMS interviews were as good as the Standard verbal interviews on almost all accuracy measures, i.e., Total Accuracy, People Accuracy, Action Accuracy, and Description Accuracy. The mean accuracy for all accuracy measures in the IMS interviews was high, which is in line with previous research using aids together with the best practice components, such as ground rules and open-ended questions (Dorado & Saywitz, 2001;Hershkowitz et al, 2001;Holliday, 2003;Memon et al, 2010). The only exception was Object Accuracy, which was significantly better in the Standard verbal interviews where it was very high, 0.98; in addition, even though the difference between the methods was significant, the mean Object Accuracy in the IMS interviews was still 0.88.…”

“…Previous research indicates that children as young as 4 years of age can provide reliable and valid information when interviewed properly (Holliday, 2003;Lamb et al, 2007), and when age differences are seen they concern mainly the amount of information that children can provide. For example, Hershkowitz et al (2012) investigated finer age differences in patterns of response and found that 3-and 4-year-olds were less capable than 5-and 6-year-olds in providing informative and detailed statements.…”

“…This technique is used within the Cognitive Interview (CI) procedure and has proved to increase the details reported by children, especially in 4 to 6-year-olds (Hershkowitz, Orbach, Lamb, Sternberg, & Horowitz, 2001), without negatively affecting accuracy. For example in a study by Holliday (2003) investigating whether the Cognitive interview facilitated correct recall in 4-5-year-old and 9-10-year-old children, the mean accuracy rate was 81% for the younger age group. Another technique is to allow children to draw the event, which increased the amount and accuracy of the information that children reported (Butler, Gross, & Hayne, 1995;Gross & Hayne, 1998;Katz & Hershkowitz, 2010).…”

A comfortable witness is a good witness: rapport‐building and susceptibility to misinformation in an investigative mock‐crime interview

“…This design allowed us to determine whether building rapport can act as a safeguard against reporting previously presented misinformation in adult witnesses. Recent research utilizing similar paradigms with child witnesses found that the use of cognitive interviewing including rapport-building reduced the amount of false acquiescence to leading information provided by the interviewer but that an extended rapport phase did not increase the amount of correct details reported or reduce the likelihood of reporting misinformation (Holliday, 2003;Holliday & Albon, 2004).…”

Children’s eyewitness memory: A comparison of two interviewing strategies as realized by forensic professionals

“…The effects of some of these verbally oriented protocols have been investigated in relation to the accuracy of children's memory (Granhag & Spjut, 2001;Holliday, 2003a;Holliday, 2003b). Several countries have adopted a specific verbal interview protocol as the national standard for child forensic interviews (e.g., the NICHD protocol is used in Israel).…”