Assignment
A key component of the Cognitive Interview, the mode of interviewing witnesses of a crime with the strongest empirical backing, is context reinstatement. The principle behind context reinstatement is that helping witnesses imagine themselves as they were at the time of the crime facilitates memory retrieval due to the context dependent nature of memory. Sometimes, to facilitate memory, the police may even bring the witness back to the scene of the crime in order to prompt additional memories. There are some suggestions that crime scene visits might be especially helpful for some subgroups, such as individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder because specific memory deficits make context reinstatement difficult. The difficulty is that it is often prohibitively difficult to bring witnesses to the crime scene. A plausible alternative is to develop a VR environment and have witnesses virtually revisit the crime scene. This internship project aims to develop and pilot an appropriate VR environment to be sued in subsequent testing of the theoretical ideas within an MSc thesis.
This project will be completed in collaboration with the BMS lab who will provide technical support, but there is an expectation that you work to help build the, most likely video rather than 3D model environments and test the developed product (with support).
KEYWORDS
Witness interviewing; Investigative interview; Memory; Context reinstatement.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ORGANIZATION
The section Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety at the University of Twente has a distinctive and unique profile in the areas of risk perception and risk communication, conflict and crisis management and the antecedents of risky, antisocial and criminal behaviour. It currently includes 15 research staff members and 6 PhD students. We work from both a psychology and an engineering perspective and cooperate with other scientific disciplines, based on the “high tech, human touch” profile of the University of Twente.
AVAILABILITY
Available in block 2B. This internship is open for 1 student.
INTERESTED?
Please contact the PCRS internship coordinator Miriam Oostinga (m.s.d.oostinga@utwente.nl).
LITERATURE
- Hoogesteyn, K., Meijer, E., & Vrij, A. (2020, Oct). Examining witness interviewing environments. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 17(3), 238-249. https://doi.org/10.1002/jip.1549
- Norman, D. G., Wade, K. A., Williams, M. A., & Watson, D. G. (2020). Caught virtually lying—Crime scenes in virtual reality help to expose suspects’ concealed recognition. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(1), 118-127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.12.008
- Peter W. de Vries , Jordy F. Gosselt , and Jeroen Timmer (2023) The virtual crime scene: Virtual reality context reinstatement as a means to increase the quality of eyewitness statements. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t8hqa
- Spreeuwers, N.E. (2016) Arousing Memory: Memories Obtained From Virtual Reality Are As Correctly Recalled As Memories Obtained From Conventional Two-Dimensional Screens. MSc thesis: https://essay.utwente.nl/71405/