Field test of the Cognitive Interview: enhancing the recollection of actual victims and witnesses of crime.

The Cognitive Interview was tested in the field to enhance the recollection of actual victims and witnesses of crime. The technique is based on laboratory-tested principles of memory retrieval, knowledge representation, and communication. Seven experienced detectives from the Metro-Dade Police Department were trained to use the technique and were compared with 9 untrained detectives. Before and after training, all detectives tape-recorded interviews with victims and witnesses of crime. The trained detectives elicited 47% more information after than before training, and 63% more information than did the untrained detectives. Overall collaboration rates (94%) were extremely high and were equivalent for pre- and posttrained interviews. Because the Cognitive Interview reliably enhances memory and is easily learned and administered, it should be useful for a variety of investigative interviews.

Mechanisms of hypnotic and nonhypnotic forgetting.

Subjects participated in two experimental sessions designed to study laboratory-induced amnesia, one using a standard hypnosis paradigm and one using a non-hypnotic directed-forgetting paradigm. Two independent sources of variation were derived from the hypnotic amnesia data: retrieval inhibition and inhibition release. In the nonhypnotic directed-forgetting procedure, some items were cued to be forgotten shortly after presentation and some were cued to be remembered. At test, the subjects were asked to recall both the to-be-remembered and the to-be-forgotten items. Over 39% of the variance in the recall of the to-be-forgotten items could be accounted for by the inhibition and release constructs obtained with hypnosis. These relations between the two procedures were not mediated by verbal ability or cognitive style (field independence). We concluded that the mechanisms of forgetting involved in laboratory demonstrations of hypnotic and nonhypnotic amnesia are related, and the implication is that some of them are the same, namely, retrieval inhibition and inhibition release. We also argued that the possible demand characteristics that accompany the hypnosis procedure are not apparent with the nonhypnotic procedure. Therefore, the relationships observed in the present results were taken as evidence that hypnotically induced amnesia is not entirely the result of subjects' reactions to demand characteristics.

Disrupted retrieval in directed forgetting: a link with posthypnotic amnesia.

Certain reliable findings from research on directed forgetting seem difficult to accommodate in terms of the theoretical processes, such as selective rehearsal or storage differentiation, that have been put forward to account for directed-forgetting phenomena. Some kind of "missing mechanism" appears to be involved. In order to circumvent the methodological constraints that have limited the conclusions investigators could draw from past experiments, a new paradigm is introduced herein that includes a mixture of intentional and incidental learning. With this paradigm, a midlist instruction to forget the first half of a list was found to reduce later recall of the items learned incidentally as well as those learned intentionally. This result suggests that a cue to forget can lead to a disruption of retrieval processes as well as to the alteration of encoding processes postulated in prior theories. The results also provide a link between intentional forgetting and the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, in which disrupted retrieval has been implicated. With each of these procedures, the information that can be remembered is typically recalled out of order and often with limited recollection for when the information had been presented. It therefore was concluded here that retrieval inhibition plays a significant role in nonhypnotic as well as in hypnotic instances of directed forgetting. The usefulness of retrieval inhibition as a mechanism for memory updating was also discussed.

A human performance evaluation of graphic symbol-design features.

16 subjects learned each of two tactical display symbol sets (conventional symbols and iconic symbols) in turn and were then shown a series of graphic displays containing various symbol configurations. For each display, the subject was asked questions corresponding to different behavioral processes relating to symbol use (identification, search, comparison, pattern recognition). The results indicated that: (a) conventional symbols yielded faster pattern-recognition performance than iconic symbols, and iconic symbols did not yield faster identification than conventional symbols, and (b) the portrayal of additional feature information (through the use of perimeter density or vector projection coding) slowed processing of the core symbol information in four tasks, but certain symbol-design features created less perceptual interference and had greater correspondence with the portrayal of specific tactical concepts than others. The results were discussed in terms of the complexities involved in the selection of symbol design features for use in graphic tactical displays.

Modality effects in short term recognition memory.

Retention was assessed using a four-alternative recognition test in a modified Brown-Peterson paradigm. Performance decreased with the length of the distraction interval at a faster rate when the test modality (auditory or visual) did not match the presentation modality than when test and presentation modalities did match. These results, which were replicated in a second experiment, were interpreted in terms of a dual-access model of the recognition process and a feature conception of memory codes. Also, in Experiment 1, modality-specific encoding was not circumvented by dual-modality presentation (auditory plus visual): dual-modality presentation resulted in performance comparable to that observed following visual presentation. When subjects were instructed to attend to both modalities equally in Experiment 2, the pattern of results reflected a corresponding shift in attentional bias but modality-dependent encoding was circumvented only partially. This result was interpreted as being inconsistent with either the notion of modality-specific processing capacities or dual-code theory.

Eye movements and over rehearsal in wood recall.

Rates of overt rehearsal and eye movement were compared to each other, and were also compared as predictors of immediate and delayed recall, using practiced subjects who studied lists of eight simultaneously presented words. The correlation between number of eye fixations per word and number of rehearsals per word was greater in immediate than in delayed recall. Also, the number of fixations exceeded the number of overt rehearsals, especially under delayed-recall conditions. However, both overt rehearsals and eye movements were slower in delayed recall. The number of overt rehearsals and the number of fixations per word were good predictors of immediate recall, but neither was highly correlated with delayed recall. Engaging in overt rehearsal had the following effects: It slowed down eye movements, seemed to bias the subject toward a serial learning strategy, improved immediate recall, and did not reduce delayed recall. It was concluded that total looking time was the best predictor of long-term retention and that recall performance following overt rehearsal was different from recall performance following silent study.

Effects of sentence ordering on thematic decisions to remember and forget prose.

Sentences from each of two different passages were intermixed and presented to subjects auditorily. During each intersentence interval, the subjects made a to-be-remembered (TBR) vs to-be-forgotten (TBF) decision on the basis of theme membership and then selectively rehearsed the TBR sentences for later recall. Presenting either the TBR or TBF sentences in a logical order facilitated sentence recall of both types but had little effect on recognition. The within-subject relationships between decision time and recall were consistent with the between-subject effects of presenting either passage in a logical order on the recall of the remaining passage. Shorter decision times were associated with greater TBR recall but longer decision times were associated with greater TBF recall. It was concluded that processing during the decision phase was different from the maintenance rehearsal found during the TBR-TBF cue-delay interval in directed-forgetting tasks. Ordering of the TBF message did not affect processing if its general theme was not known.

Effects of imagining speakers' voices on the retention of words presented visually.

Subjects were introduced to one male and one female voice by a tape recording with instructions to attend to characteristics of the voices. Then 18 pairs of words were presented visually on slides. The subject's task during each 10-sec interslide interval was to repeat silently the pair of words over and over again in the male voice, in the female voice, or in the subject's own voice. A surprise recognition test for the words indicated that the words were more likely to be recognized if they were spoken in the same Voice at test as was used to repeat them during presentation. Recognition of the words repeated in the subject's own voice was not affected by the sex of the speaker at test. In Experiment 2, different speakers were used at test than those used by the subjects to repeat the words. The interaction between the sex of voice used at encoding and at test was again significant, but recognition was generally lower than in Experiment 1. It was concluded that it is not necessary to assume that subjects have literal copies of spoken words in memory but speaker's voice does form an integral part of the verbal memory code and its influence is specific to a given speaker as well as to a given class of speakers (male or female).

Incidental retention of speaker's voice.

Geiselman and Bellezza (1976) concluded that any retention in memory of the sex of a speaker of verbal material is automatic. Two possible reasons for this were hypothesized: the voice-connotation hypothesis and the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered sentences contained either male or female agents. Incidental retention of sex of speaker did not occur. This result does not support the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis, which indicates that retention of voice should be independent of sentence content. In Experiment 2, the sentences contained neutral agents and incidental retention of sex of speaker did occur. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the connotation hypothesis. The different results with regard to incidental retention of speakers's voice found in Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 using a within-subjects design. Experimemt 4 was conducted to determine if a speaker's voice does, in fact, influence the meaning of a neutral sentence. In agreement with the voice-connotation hypothesis, sentences spoken by a male were rated as having more "potent" connotations than sentences spoken by a female.

Long-term memory for speaker's voice and source location.

One hundred and twenty-eight subjects tried to recall 20 simple sentences that for some subjects were presented in two different voices or were presented from two loudspeakers on different sides of the room. In addition, some subjects were instructed to remember not only the sentences, but also their voice and location attributes. Intentional instructions for location resulted in poorer recall of the sentences, but intentional instructions for voice did not. The voice attribute seemed to be automatically coded under both intentional and incidental instructions for remembering the attribute, whereas the location attribute seemed to require cognitive processing in addition to that required for encoding the meaning of the sentence. A test for clustering by voice in recall was done to determine if the evidence for automatic ceding of voice was merely an artifact resulting from better recall because of organization. However, no clustering was found. The ideas that speaker's voice and sentence meaning were processed in parallel by different hemispheres of the brain and that the connotation of the voice influenced the meaning of each sentence were offered as two possible explanations of the results.

Semantic processing and organization in free recall.

It was hypothesized that both semantic processing and organizational activity are necessary for optimal free recall performance. In a series of three experiments, subjects were presented with a list of randomly selected nouns and were asked to make up a meaningful sentence for each noun. The subjects also rated the difficulty of using each noun. The subjects were instructed to try to remember words that were labeled "remember" words. For words that were labeled "story" words, the subjects were instructed only to make each sentence, using the word, part of an ongoing story which each subject was to make up. A test of retention for all presented words, using retention intervals of both 1 min and 24 h, showed that the story words were always recalled better than were the remember words. However, the amount of sequential organization was the same for both the story and the remember words. Recognition performance was found to be the same for both types of words. In addition, the story words were rated as being more difficult than the remember words. It was concluded that extensive semantic processing without organization is not sufficient for optimal recall.

Eye movements under different rehearsal strategies.

Eye movements were recorded while subjects studied lists of simultaneously presented words. The 24 subjects in the storage group studied for immediate recall, and the 24 subjects in the coding group studied primarily for a later, final recall. Those subjects in the coding group had longer eye fixations and fewer regressions than did subjects in the storage group. In addition, the subjects in the coding group recalled fewer words in immediate recall and more words in final recall than did the subjects in the storage group. These results were interpreted as supporting the elaboration hypothesis of coding in rehearsal, which states that coding into long-term store consists of rehearsing both old and new information in short-term store. The results did not support the concentration hypothesis, which states that coding into long-term store consists of intensively rehearsing a smaller number of items than rehearsed under a storage strategy. The eye movement data also indicate that subjects read about twice as many words as they overtly rehearse.

Single-trial free recall from temporal search sets in long-term memory.

The notion that the primacy effect, which is found in single-trial free-recall experiments, is partly a function of a selective-search component (Shiffrin, 1970) is contingent upon the ability of subjects to retrieve information via a distinctive temporal cue. The beginning of a list may be such a cue which defines a restricted temporal search set within a list as a whole. To test this theory, a second list-half primacy effect was generated in some 26 "unrelated" words lists by associating one color with each word in the first list half and another color with each word in the second list half. As predicted by the two-process theory, retrieval of the words which were presented around the color shift was differentially facilitated as measured by the difference between the probabilities of recall and recognition at each serial position and as compared to that of lists where the color codes were randomly presented.

Positive forgetting of sentence material.

This experiment investigated the positive-forgetting phenomenon with sentence material. Sets of sentences were presented to Ss with each sentence being cued "remember" or "forget" immediately following its presentation. To-be-remembered (TBR) sentences were found to be more accessible thanto-be-forgotten (TBF) sentences and uncued control sentences. Sentence connectedness was found to be an important determiner of the magnitude of the observed recall phenomenon; but differential sentence interest was not a significant factor. Using a multiple-choice recognition test, key words or phrases from the to-be-forgotten sentences were found to be equally available as key words or phrases from the to-be-remembered sentences. These results warrant an extention of Bjork's (1970, 1972) selective-rehearsal and differential-grouping interpretation of the positive-forgetting phenomenon to encompass sentence material. Some implications of the findings for single-presentation information acquisition were noted.