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R E Geiselman

Publications and source records attributed to R E Geiselman.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

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.

Crime

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.

Amnesia

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.

Amnesia

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.

Attention

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.

Adult

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.

Attention

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.

Adolescent