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To elicit uncontaminated memories from children, is the highest priority for investigative interviewers in criminal and legal proceedings. Police interviewers rarely rely on fully acceptable questioning techniques and defence lawyers may use inappropriate approaches on child eyewitnesses and victims, in an attempt to diminish their testimony. Despite various detailed guidelines and legal rules, on how to interview children in legal settings in Switzerland and the UK, the instructions mostly focus on question types and lack any references towards the influence of potential gestures by interviewers. The main aim of this thesis was to find out if gestures are commonly used in investigative interviews; and how they can influence children’s eyewitness statements and ultimately corrupt their memory. The thesis focused on two countries: Switzerland and England. Whilst there are a couple of studies that have investigated the influence of gestures in child interviews in England (Broaders & Goldin-Meadow, 2010; Kirk, Gurney, Edwards, & Dodimead, 2015), to our knowledge, no studies have been conducted in other countries, including Switzerland. Study 1 included interviews with Swiss police child interviewers, evaluating their guidelines and practices in regard to investigative child interviews. Study 2 investigated, whether investigative interviewers in Italy produced hand gestures when interviewing children. The Study found that interviewers produced a wide range of iconic gestures. Study 3 built on this and investigated whether misleading gestures during interviews could affect the correct responses of adults. It was found that the misleading gestures led to a decrease in correct responses and most participants were misled by at least one of the gestures. Study 4 then tested the gestural misinformation effect in children of three age groups. Results showed that the misleading gestures affected participants’ responses and led to a decrease in accuracy in children’s testimonies. Finally, Study 5 tested the gestural misinformation effect in children in England and Switzerland, in two delay conditions and between two age groups for a mock robbery video. Results confirmed the robustness of the gestural misinformation effect, irrespective of age, country or delay. Overall, it was concluded that gestures seem to be a common behaviour by interviewers and can negatively impact accurate eyewitness testimony of children. The findings have significant implications, demonstrating that non-verbal behaviour in form of gestures can alter children’s memory and thus, corrupt forensic investigations in police interviews.

Children who have developmental disorders that involve memorial deficits and impairments in social interaction and communication, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), can present challenges to professionals seeking their testimony when they are victims or witnesses of a crime. Most forensic interviews involve long delays after an event, underscoring the importance of conducting experimental studies which consider the effect of delay on children's memory. In this research, fifty-nine children (age 6-15 years) with ASD (N=27) and without disabilities (N=32) were questioned about their participation in a set of activities after a two-week delay and again after a two-month delay, using the Revised National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Investigative Interview Protocol. A detailed coding scheme was designed to code and analyse the interviewers' utterances and the children's responses in 118 interviews. Transcripts were coded for completeness (with respect to the gist of the event), amount of narrative details, and accuracy. Results indicated that autistic children did not differ from typically developing (TD) peers on any dimensions of memory after both delays. Specifically, both groups of children provided equivalently complete accounts on both occasions. However, children in both groups provided significantly fewer narrative details about the event in the second interview, and the accuracy rates were lower. Recall prompts elicited more detailed and more accurate responses from children in both groups than recognition prompts. Although autistic children recalled fewer correct narrative details than TD peers when questioned using open-ended recall prompts, they were as accurate as TD peers in response to recognition prompts. The informativeness and accuracy of children's reports remained unchanged over time. Finally, social support was beneficial when children were interviewed for the first time but not after a longer delay. The findings indicate that autistic children can provide meaningful and reliable testimony about an event they personally experienced, but several aspects of their memory reports deteriorate over time.

The desire to enhance and make ourselves better is not a new one and it has continued to intrigue throughout the ages. Individuals have continued to seek ways to improve and enhance their well-being for example through nutrition, physical exercise, education and so on. Crucial to this improvement of their well-being is improving their ability to remember. Hence, people interested in improving their well-being, are often interested in memory as well. The rationale being that memory is crucial to our well-being. The desire to improve one’s memory then is almost certainly as old as the desire to improve one’s well-being. Traditionally, people have used different means in an attempt to enhance their memories: for example in learning through storytelling, studying, and apprenticeship. In remembering through practices like mnemonics, repetition, singing, and drumming. In retaining, storing and consolidating memories through nutrition and stimulants like coffee to help keep awake; and by external aids like notepads and computers. In forgetting through rituals and rites. Recent scientific advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, molecular biology, neuroscience, and information technologies, present a wide variety of technologies to enhance many different aspects of human functioning. Thus, some commentators have identified human enhancement as central and one of the most fascinating subject in bioethics in the last two decades. Within, this period, most of the commentators have addressed the Ethical, Social, Legal and Policy (ESLP) issues in human enhancements as a whole as opposed to specific enhancements. However, this is problematic and recently various commentators have found this to be deficient and called for a contextualized case-by-case analysis to human enhancements for example genetic enhancement, moral enhancement, and in my case memory enhancement (ME). The rationale being that the reasons for accepting/rejecting a particular enhancement vary depending on the enhancement itself. Given this enormous variation, moral and legal generalizations about all enhancement processes and technologies are unwise and they should instead be evaluated individually. Taking this as a point of departure, this research will focus specifically on making a case for ME and in doing so assessing the ESLP implications arising from ME. My analysis will draw on the already existing literature for and against enhancement, especially in part two of this thesis; but it will be novel in providing a much more in-depth analysis of ME. From this perspective, I will contribute to the ME debate through two reviews that address the question how we enhance the memory, and through four original papers discussed in part three of this thesis, where I examine and evaluate critically specific ESLP issues that arise with the use of ME. In the conclusion, I will amalgamate all my contribution to the ME debate and suggest the future direction for the ME debate.

A wealth of research has highlighted the susceptibility of eyewitnesses to verbal influence. However, considerably less attention has been paid to the role of nonverbal influence in police questioning. The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the extent to which gestures can exert an influence on witnesses and skew their responses when questioned. Study 1 initially investigated this by presenting participants with an on-screen 'police' interviewer who accompanied his questions with gestures conveying either accurate or misleading information about a piece of video footage they had witnessed. Results showed that, for one question in particular, participants' responses concurred with the information conveyed to them in gesture; accurate gestures led more participants to giving correct responses and misleading gestures led more participants to giving fabricated responses. Study 2 built on this by examining whether gestures could also affect the confidence attributed to their responses in order to give insight into whether gestures were knowingly processed for information. It was found that, in some cases, gestures were able to increase confidence in both accurate and misled responses. Study 3 examined participants' awareness of gesture further by studying their attention to gesture during its performance and ability to identify it retrospectively on a recognition task. A new set of questions confirmed that gestures could influence the responses of participants (including those working in the legal profession) and revealed that the influence of gesture appears to be at its strongest when unnoticed by participants. Finally, study 4 considered whether the results of the previous studies could be replicated in a more ecologically valid interview scenario and confirmed that gestures continued to be influential when performed face-to-face. Overall, it was concluded that gestures can impact accurate eyewitness testimony and can be a powerful influential tool in police interviews.

Six separate experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of specific retrieval procedures on recall, recognition, confidence and the confidence / accuracy relationship for these retrieval domains. In experiment I the effects of retrieval procedures were considered as part of a recognised police interview technique, the Cognitive Interview (CI), while in experiments 11,111, and IV the retrieval procedures involved discrete context manipulations. Experiments V and VI focused exclusively on the confidence / accuracy relationship for recall as a function of specific retrieval procedures and question type. Results indicated that although frequently improving the quality and quantity of recall, the Cl and other types of context reinstatement manipulation did not reliably improve recognition accuracy from lineup presentations, nor did they have a significant moderating effect upon the confidence / accuracy relationship. However in experiment TV in which a long (three month) delay was utilised significant effects of context manipulation on recognition performance were found. With regard to confidence, experiment I indicated that the Cl was responsible for a significant increase in confidence of recall but not recognition. Results from experiments II, III, and iv indicated non consistent effects of context manipulation on confidence, rating-q for either recall and recognition. With regard to the confidence / accuracy relationship, results from the initial five experiments indicated that in very few instances was confidence and accuracy significantly related. However, in experiment VI confidence and accuracy was found to be reliably and consistently related The most important finding to emerge from this research suggests the retrieval procedure undergone by a witness (interactive interview / passive questionnaire), to be an important moderator of the confidence / accuracy relationship. As such the results are supportive of Leippe's (1980) two premises in which it is suggested that as reconstructional and social influences increase, the confidence / accuracy relationship will correspondingly decrease

This study was an experiment comparing participant responses to a mock trial script including confident eyewitness testimony (that was either supported or contradicted by the mock trial evidence presented in the script) with, and without, expert testimony on the accuracy of eyewitness reports and memory errors. The researcher hypothesized that mock jurors exposed to expert testimony on the limitations of eyewitness accounts would be less likely to convict when faced with an eyewitness statement that was inconsistent with the presented trial facts. 156 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk were included in the final analyses. While the evidence did not support the eyewitness testimony, there was a significant difference (p .10) between the groups, (2 [1, N = 83] = 3.44, p = 0.063, Cramer’s V = .20) with those exposed to the expert testimony choosing to convict at a rate 20% higher than those not exposed to the expert. Not only did the jurors exposed to expert witness testimony and trial facts inconsistent with eyewitness testimony not convict less than their counterparts, but the jurors in this designated group also convicted at a higher percentage than all of the other groups. There is a gap in our field when it comes to educating our jurors about eyewitness errors. Researchers have to find a way to close the gap between academia and jurors in order to help those at the mercy of the law.

According to The Innocence Project, 69% of DNA exonerations in the United States involved mistaken eyewitness identification as a contributing factor to these errant convictions. Psychologists have contributed towards minimizing mistaken identifications by proposing best practices that law enforcement still follow today. One understudied cause of mistaken eyewitness identification is unconscious transference (UT). UT is a memory error in which a person encountered in an innocent context becomes confused with a person seen in a guilty context (Loftus, 1976). Past research has established some boundary conditions for when UT can occur; however, the limited methodology has resulted in narrow conclusions that do not fully account for all instances of UT. This study builds upon past research to establish a novel paradigm for understanding UT. Additionally, this study introduces how familiarity may be a critical factor in causing instances of UT. The results reveal that this novel paradigm reliably captures instances of UT and demonstrates that having familiarity with a suspect can lead to UT errors. Furthermore, this study finds support for the memory blending theoretical approach of UT. Through the discussion, the stark difference between familiar suspect identification and stranger suspect identification are revealed. Additionally, I propose considerations for future research and how cases with familiar suspects should be handled in the future.

Children’s narrative accounts play a major role in cases of alleged child maltreatment. Case outcomes are highly dependent upon the statements children provide during forensic interviews. Bilingual children are vastly underrepresented in the forensic interviewing literature despite the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. The present study compared monolingual (n = 31) and bilingual (n = 34) preschool-aged children’s ability to provide meaningful reports about a staged event following a delay. Additionally, we examined group differences in resistance to suggestion, language abilities, and executive functioning. Bilingual and monolingual children’s narrative quality scores and performance on suggestive questions did not differ significantly. Individual difference factors such as age, language abilities, and executive functioning were significantly correlated with narrative quality and resistance to suggestion. Explanations for the findings and forensic implications are discussed.

Much research has been devoted to understanding how the confidence of an eyewitness influences jurors’ global assessments of the witness’s credibility. However, even credible witnesses are likely to report well-remembered aspects of an event with certainty, and less well-remembered aspects of the same event with uncertainty. The current study assessed whether participants would believe all testimony provided by a given witness to the same extent, or whether they would instead selectively disbelieve those aspects of a witness’s testimony that were delivered with uncertainty, while accepting as valid those pieces of testimony that were delivered with certainty. When belief in witness testimony was assessed at short retention intervals, participant-jurors selectively disbelieved uncertain pieces of witness testimony, and their belief ratings were well calibrated with the amount of uncertainty expressed (Experiment 1). However, after a delay of one week, participant-jurors evidenced inflated belief in uncertain testimony, and no sensitivity to the amount of uncertainty expressed (Experiment 2). Finally, delaying participant-jurors’ belief ratings affected ratings of uncertain and certain testimony differently: Whereas belief in uncertain testimony increased over a one-week retention interval, belief in certain testimony remained nearly identical over the same interval (Experiment 3), thus showing that participant-jurors’ memory for witness uncertainty was short-lived.

Children involved in maltreatment investigations often discuss allegations with their mothers before formal reports are made to authorities. The primary purpose of the current study was to evaluate the amount and the accuracy of information children reported to their mothers about a non-shared experience. Children aged 4- to 7-years-old (N = 142) individually participated in a staged event and discussed the experience with their mothers approximately six-days later. Prior to interviewing children, mothers were provided with some details about the non-shared event. Accurately-biased mothers had accurate information about the event. Inaccurately-biased mothers had both accurate and inaccurate information about the experience. Individual difference factors including children’s age, maternal reminiscing style, and attachment quality were hypothesized to moderate the relationship between maternal bias and children’s reports. The results revealed older children had highly reliable reports regardless of maternal bias or maternal reminiscing style. However, younger children with inaccurately biased and high elaborative mothers reported less accurate and more inaccurate information about the event compared to younger children with inaccurately-biased and low elaborative mothers. Additionally, children of mothers with insecure attachment quality reported fewer details and made more inaccurate statements regarding the event. Results suggest that the mnemonic consequence of discussing past experiences with mothers varies depending on maternal bias, children’s age, maternal reminiscing style, and attachment quality. Forensic and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Researchers have reported errors in recall or recognition of witnessed events, accounting for the most common cause of false convictions of innocent people. Tiwari (2010) indicated that 25% of suspects who were identified in a line-up were actually innocent. Jurors are strongly influenced by eyewitness testimony and this can lead to false convictions. The validity of eyewitness identification is critical in cases in which it is used as evidence. In the current study we examined specific emotion states by inducing fear, surprise, and neutral moods. We hypothesized that participants in the Fear group would be least susceptible to the effects of exposure to misleading details, and that women would show higher levels of accuracy for details related to persons in a scene, and men higher levels of accuracy for spatial details. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three mood groups, mood was manipulated, they viewed an image of a crime scene, were exposed to misleading details, completed a manipulation check, and lastly their memory for the scene was assessed. Results revealed no significant group differences on the number of correctly answered misleading items. The findings suggest that experiencing these specific mood states during encoding does not result in significant differences in later memory recall.

The objective of this two part study was to determine if knowledge of a future public presentation of an eyewitness testimony could obviate positive post-identification feedback effects. All participants had to watch a video that depicted a young male stealing a laptop computer, making them an eyewitness to a crime. Following the video, an identification from a photo line-up had to be made and regardless of the identification, all participants were given positive feedback. A series of post-identification questions were answered and participants in the experimental group were told that when they returned to the lab for part two of the study they would be giving a public presentation of their eyewitness testimony while those in the control group were told no such thing. The post-identification questions had to be answered during part two of the study and an additional question pertaining to confidence was answered as well. A two-tailed independent samples test was used to reveal any differences in participant confidence between groups. Additionally, an ANOVA was used to analyze the effect of time and public presentation expectation on answers to the post-identification questions. The implications of this study are reviewed in the discussion section.

Source confusions between witnessed events and post-event suggestions are more likely to occur when the suggested information helps to explain the causal factors that contributed to the event's outcome. With evidence suggesting that human involvement in a causal chain (either deliberate or unintentional) is a more "satisfying" explanation than the involvement of a purely physical agent (such as wear-and-tear or weather,) the current study sought to answer whether such false memory formation might occur at higher rates for post-event suggestions of human causes than for suggested physical causes. Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis by providing 139 university undergraduate participants with original story events in audio narrative form, then introducing a post-event suggestion regarding a human-deliberate, human-unintended, or purely physical cause for the story outcome, and finally assessing source misattributions through a free recall task. Participants reliably misremembered all three types of post-event causal suggestion as having been part of the original story event, but as predicted, the likelihood of falsely recalling causal post-event information depended on the type of cause that was suggested, with suggested human causes -- either deliberate or unintended -- being misattributed to the original event at higher rates than suggested physical causes. Experiment 2 examined the hypothesis in a sample of 105 university undergraduates with a recognition source test instead of a free recall task. While there was a significant effect of post-event suggestion versus control (no additional causal information,) participants did not misremember human causes as having been part of the original event at a higher rate than physical, as they had in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 1 clearly support the hypothesis, but the results of Experiment 2, while not altogether inconsistent with the underlying expectations, raise perplexing possibilities that beg further investigation. Follow-up data supported the idea that the difference between types of causes in Experiment 1 may reflect a difference in the perceived "newsworthiness" of the misattributed human and physical causal material. Human causes were judged as less likely than the physical causes to bring about the given outcome by participants who were asked to consider all three causal possibilities. Those causes which were viewed as least likely were, when provided in the form of post-event suggestion and misattributed to the original story, most likely to be freely reported.

Chrobak and Zaragoza (2008) demonstrated that participants were prone to developing false memories for entire fictitious events that they had earlier been forced to fabricate. The current research was designed to test the hypothesis that participants would be more likely to develop false memories for their forced fabrications when they provided a causal explanation for observed events than when the fabrications did not serve this explanatory role (the explanatory role hypothesis). Experiments 1 and 2 employed similar methodologies, differing only in the memory measure administered at final test. Participants viewed an eyewitness event, were forced to fabricate an entire fictitious event during a subsequent interview, and then returned 6 weeks later for a memory test. The primary manipulation involved the nature of the relationship between the fabricated and witnessed events. In the Explanatory condition, participants’ fabrications helped explain outcomes witnessed in the video. However, in Non-Explanatory condition, the fabrications no longer filled this same role – because the related consequence scenes were replaced by unrelated scenes. Overall, participants were more likely to freely report (Experiment 1) and falsely assent to (Experiment 2) their fabrications when they helped explain events witnessed in the video.In Experiment 3, all participants viewed the same eyewitness event. The explanatory strength of participants’ forced fabrications was manipulated by varying whether or not participants received an alternative explanation for the events their fabrication helped to explain. Immediately following the forced fabrication interview, participants read narratives that provided additional information about several characters in the video. In the Alternative Explanation (AE) condition, some of the information in the narrative could be used to provide an alternative explanation for the viewed critical outcomes in the video (fabrication had low explanatory strength). In the No Alternative Explanation (NE) condition, participants read about similar information that could not be used to explain the viewed outcome (fabrication had high explanatory strength). At test, participants were less likely to report their forced fabrications in the Alternative Explanation condition, where the explanatory power of their forced fabrications had been reduced. Collectively, the current experiments provide strong support for the explanatory role hypothesis.

The effects of trivial details on subjects' perception of eyewitness expertise were examined. Prior research indicated that the perceived memory and perceived confidence of the eyewitness were suggested as two possible influences on perceptions of the eyewitness' expertise. In order to examine these influences, a 2 X 2 X 2 between-subjects design was employed where the amount of trivial detail (high vs. low), memory of the eyewitness (strong vs. weak), and confidence of the eyewitness (high vs. low) were manipulated. The dependent variables were the perception of the guilt of the defendant, and the perception of the accuracy, competence, and consistency of the eyewitness. The experimenter failed to find an effect for trivial detail effect on guilt, or any of the expertise judgments. However, subjects rated the defendant as less guilty when the eyewitness had both strong memory and high confidence than when the eyewitness did not have both strong memory and high confidence. The same pattern was found for both the accuracy and competence judgments but not for the consistency judgments. Implications and future research are discussed.