Self-Generated Cues: The role of cue quality in facilitating eyewitness recall

Purpose: Witness-led techniques, informed by theory, have been recognised as best practice for eliciting information from cooperative eyewitnesses. In the current research, we test a self-generated cue (SGC) mnemonic grounded in memory theory and explore the impact of three SGC mnemonics on subsequent recall performance.

Methodology: Participants (N = 170) witnessed a live staged event and reported their recall using a SGC mnemonic (keywords only, event-line, or concept map) or control technique (other-generated cues or free recall only). These mock witness accounts were compared in terms of correct and incorrect details reported.

Findings: Fewer correct details were reported in the other-generated cue condition compared to the SGC event-line (p = .018) and SGC concept map (p = .010). There were no significant differences between free recall alone and any other condition. The number of inaccurate details reported did not differ between conditions (p = .153). Our findings suggest that high quality free recall instructions can benefit recall performance above generic cues (e.g. other-generated cues) but using SGCs to support a structured recall (e.g., concept map or event-line) may offer an additional recall benefit.

Originality: Our findings support previous research that SGCs benefit recall beyond other-generated cues. However, by comparing different cue generation techniques grounded in the literature, we extend such findings to show that SGC generation techniques are not equally effective and that combining SGCs with structured recall is likely to carry the greatest benefit to recall.