Does Extensive Free Narrative Prompting Minimise the Effect of Mental Reinstatement on Children's Recall of Events?

Abstract

The effect of mental reinstatement on children's recall is unclear. One factor that may impact its effectiveness is the degree to which interviewers prompt children during an interview. We examined whether interviewers’ degree of narrative prompting moderated the effect of mental context reinstatement during children's recall of a staged event. Younger and older children were interviewed 7–10 days after the event. Half were told to mentally reinstate the context and half were not. In a fully crossed design, half also received extended narrative prompting during the interview and half did not. We predicted that extensive narrative prompting should reduce any observable benefit of mental reinstatement, especially for older children. However, mental reinstatement had no beneficial effect on recall performance. It is possible that methodological differences, low statistical power, and a small effect size may have reduced the observable benefit of mental reinstatement in comparison to other studies. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that until further research can clearly define the parameters in which mental reinstatement is useful, and therefore produce findings with greater consistency across studies, there is little support for its use in investigative interviews with child witnesses.

Key words:

• child witness
• investigative interviewing
• mental reinstatement
• sexual abuse

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the support and feedback from Mia Gentle during the data design and collection phase of the project.

Notes

1. In addition, three studies examined the effect of mental reinstatement when combined with an instruction to report everything (consistent with the cognitive interview protocol), which was not provided in the control condition (Hayes & Delamothe, 1997; Holliday & Albon, 2004; Larsson, Granhag, & Spjut, 2003; Milne & Bull, 2002). Therefore, it cannot be determined whether the beneficial effect is due to mental reinstatement alone, so these studies were not included in the review.

2. Non-significant age differences were found for incorrect sequence details, F(1, 93) = 2.75, p > .05 (M = 0.18, SD = 0.43), and incorrect broad statement details, F(1, 93) = 2.31, p > .05 (M = 0.02, SD = 0.11). The lack of significance might have been due to the low means.

3. Two types of incorrect details were analysed, internal response errors and confabulations (external response intrusions). Confabulations involved responses that were false in relation to the magic show event or made-up. The number of confabulations overall was so small that it made no difference to the results whether confabulations were included with errors during analysis or excluded. Thus, the results are collapsed over all incorrect responses.