Mental context reinstatement improves adults’ reports of additional details from two instances of a repeated event

ABSTRACT

Remembering specific episodes of a repeated event can be challenging for witnesses. A mental context reinstatement (MCR) instruction increases the number of accurate details that adults report about a single (i.e., non-repeated) event; we examined whether it is similarly beneficial for adults’ reports of a repeated event. Ninety-six participants completed four activity sessions over 2 weeks. One week after the final session, participants were interviewed about two episodes: the time that they could remember best and another time. Two groups of participants received a MCR instruction: MCR1 participants were given a MCR instruction before reporting the time they remembered best, while MCR2 participants were given the same instruction as well as a “refresher” instruction before they reported on another time. Control participants did not receive any MCR instructions. Interview condition did not affect participants’ reports of memory items from the activities. However, MCR1 and MCR2 participants reported more additional details – that is, unverifiable details from before, during and after the activities – than control participants. They were also more likely to spontaneously report the name of the research assistant who conducted the activities. Our results provide initial support for the use of a MCR instruction to support adults’ recall of repeated events.

KEYWORDS:

• : Memory
• repeated events
• mental context reinstatement
• investigative interview

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://osf.io/56ahx/?view_only=ac0a177d509e4c89b41999e418fbf6bd.

Notes

1 For all the repeated measures ANOVAs, the assumption of equality of covariance matrices was violated. Additionally, for total details, time and location, the assumption of homogenous variance was also violated. Because group sizes were different, the robustness of Pillai’s statistic cannot be assumed, and the multivariate statistics are likely to be liberal (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2012). Therefore, for any significant main effects detected, we conducted a non-parametric equivalent. We found the same pattern of significance for all tests, so we report the parametric tests here for ease of interpretation.

2 The non-parametric equivalent was significant, Wilcoxon signed ranks test z  =  3.08, p  = .002.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.