Mental Reinstatement of Context: Do individual differences in mental time travel and eyewitness occupation influence eyewitness performance over different delay intervals?

James H Smith‐Spark,Karen Bangs

doi:10.1002/jip.1536

Abstract

AbstractThe Cognitive Interview is a memory‐enhancing interview protocol designed to optimise the access and retrieval of eyewitness memories. Its Mental Reinstatement of Context (MRC) component requires interviewees to mentally reconstruct the crime event they witnessed. Individual differences in mental time travel (MTT) relate to the extent to which a person mentally re‐experiences personal events from his or her past. Individual differences in MTT have been found to predict correct recall of a simulated crime event under immediate MRC recall conditions. To explore the relationship between MTT and performance under MRC conditions further, the present study presented a simulated crime video to 30 police officers and 26 members of the public. Eyewitness recall was tested under MRC conditions either immediately or 1 week later. Participants' general MTT and also MTT relating specifically to the crime video itself were measured via self‐report. Less correct information and more confabulations were produced after 1 week, but delay had no effect on the amount of incorrect information reported. No difference in recall was found between police officers and members of the public. Better quality MTT relating to the crime video was found to be a positive predictor of the amount of information correctly recalled under immediate conditions but not after 1 week. General MTT scores did not predict correct recall under either delay condition. Interviewers need to be aware that, due to individual differences, some witnesses may perform better under the MRC component than others.

Highlights

Eyewitnesses often hold key information about the events that they have seen
To determine whether any group differences in scores were evident between participants tested individually compared with those tested in groups, independent-samples t-tests were run on both Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ) scores and eyewitness recall performance
This study investigated the influence of individual differences in mental time travel (MTT) on eyewitness memory performance under the Mental Reinstatement of Context (MRC) component of the Cognitive Interview (e.g., Geiselman et al, 1984)

Summary

Introduction

Eyewitnesses often hold key information about the events that they have seen. an eyewitness may be the only source of information available to investigators to identify and bring to justice those responsible for perpetrating a crime. The current research built on this work; firstly, by testing eyewitness recall under MRC conditions either immediately after witnessing a simulated crime event or after a delay of one week and, secondly, by seeing whether MTT for the crime event itself, as well as general levels of MTT (as tested previously by Smith-Spark et al.), would predict eyewitness performance It extended past research on the Cognitive Interview by having a serving police officer (the first author, KB) administering the tasks, testing police officers as well as university students and members of the public ( obtaining a broader sample than just students), and using a simulated crime video filmed from a first-person eyewitness perspective rather than a third-person perspective ( adding to the verisimilitude of the event witnessed).

Methods

Results

Conclusion