BackgroundPrevious research has highlighted the potentially detrimental effects of pre-interview preparation on witness memory within an interview context (Rivard et al., 2016). The present study examined the effect of an interviewer's pre-interview knowledge on eyewitness memory beyond the initial interview.MethodStudent witnesses were interviewed one week after viewing a mock crime event by a student interviewer who was either correctly informed, incorrectly informed, or uninformed (blind) to case details and who was either told to avoid suggestions or was not given cautionary instructions.ResultsAnalyses of the witnesses' recall quantity and quality one week after the interview revealed that witnesses of blind interviewers recalled more details than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers. Witnesses of blind interviewers were also more accurate than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers, but only when interviewers were warned not to ask suggestive questions.ImplicationsFindings suggest that interviewer training and pre-interview knowledge may play an important role in witness recall.

Suspects are often intoxicated during arrest and interrogation, yet little is known about intoxicated suspects during interrogation. Student participants (n = 141) were assigned to an intoxication group (sober, placebo, intoxicated at approximately .08%) and to be guilty or innocent of cheating (i.e., the cheating paradigm). To test whether alcohol myopia leads intoxicated suspects to focus on immediate salient consequences during interrogation, an interrogator accused participants of cheating and used one of two possible interrogation scripts that varied the consequences of confession and denial. There were no significant effects of intoxication, although all false confessors were intoxicated. Guilty participants focused more on short-term consequences than innocent participants when providing statements that could be interpreted as incriminating. Most participants made such a guilt-suggestive statement, indicating that if they talk to police anyone is at risk of saying something to reinforce investigators' suspicions. Low-to-moderate intoxication, surprisingly, does not amplify that risk.

Skilled investigative interviewing is critical to ensuring that credible witness accounts are gathered in criminal investigations. The current study aimed to determine whether instructions to avoid suggestive questions and pre-interview knowledge influence both the quality of an interviewer's questioning strategy and the interviewer's memory for the witness' account after a 1-week delay in a laboratory study using lay student interviewers and witnesses. Results indicated that access to case details prior to the interview did not significantly influence the type or quality of questions asked within the interview itself but significantly influenced interviewers' memories for their interview 1 week later. Those who were blind to case information at the time of the interview had more accurate memories of their witness interviews than those who were correctly or incorrectly pre-informed. Instructions to avoid suggestive questions served to reduce suggestive questions, regardless of pre-interview knowledge. Taken together, these findings suggest that pre-interview preparation may influence investigative outcomes beyond the interview context and traditional measures of witness accuracy.

OBJECTIVE We explored whether an educational forensic science informational (FSI) video either alone or with specialized jury instructions would assist mock jurors in evaluating forensic expert testimony. HYPOTHESES We predicted that the FSI video would help participants distinguish between low-quality and high-quality testimony, evidenced by lower ratings of the testimony and the expert when the testimonial quality was low compared with when it was high. METHOD Jury-eligible adults (N = 641; Mage = 38.18 years; 77.4% White; 8.1% Latino/a or Hispanic; 50.1% male) watched a mock trial and were randomly assigned to a no-forensic-evidence control condition or to a test condition (i.e., participants either watched the FSI video before the trial or did not and either received specialized posttrial instructions or did not). In the test conditions, a forensic expert provided low-quality or high-quality testimony about a latent impression, and participants rated the expert, their testimony, and the forensic evidence. All participants rendered verdicts. RESULTS The presence of the FSI video interacted with testimonial quality on ratings of the expert and forensic testimony: In the video-present condition, participants rated the expert in the low-quality testimony condition lower than did participants in the high-quality testimony condition (between-condition differences for credibility: d = -0.52, 95% confidence interval [CI] [-0.78, -0.27]; trustworthiness: d = -0.67, 95% CI [-0.92, -0.42]; knowledgeability: d = -0.54, 95% CI [-0.80, -0.29]). The pattern was the same for the expert's testimony (between-condition differences for convincingness: d = -0.41, 95% CI [-0.66, -0.16]; validity: d = -0.60, 95% CI [-0.86, -0.35]; presentation quality: d = -0.51, 95% CI [-0.76, -0.25]). Participants' ratings in the video-absent condition did not differ on the basis of testimonial quality (ds = -0.07-0.11). The ratings of the print evidence and verdicts were unaffected. Specialized jury instructions had no effect. CONCLUSION The FSI video may be a practical in-court intervention to increase jurors' sensitivity to low-quality forensic testimony without creating skepticism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Forensic science is a central component of jurors' decisions in many criminal cases. Nevertheless, research has shown that jurors are not sensitive to violations of testimonial guidelines for expert testimony in court and generally struggle to comprehend and evaluate forensic science testimony. Consequently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) developed the Uniform Language for Testimony and Reports (ULTR) to standardize the language used in such testimony. The current study created and tested a Forensic Science Informational (FSI) video as an intervention to bolster jurors' understanding of FSI. After reading a case summary, participants were randomly assigned to read and rate five forensic expert testimony violations without any training, or to watch the FSI video before reading and rating each violation. Results revealed that participants with video exposure rated both the expert testimony and the expert themselves lower than those without such exposure, indicating they recognized the violations.