Improving responding to questioning using a brief retrieval training

•We examined a brief training procedure for enhancing witness responding to questioning.•The training resulted in fewer errors and more rejections for questions that had no answer.•The training increased the likelihood that substantive responses could be assumed to be correct.•This training has potential as a supplement to existing interviewing techniques.

This research examined the effect of a brief training procedure for enhancing responding to questions about witnessed events. The training was based in research on metacognition and memory, and emphasized: attending to questions, searching for multiple responses, and weighing confidence in and considering the source of responses. In the main study, adult participants viewed a video of a burglary and after a 25 min delay half received the training. All participants were then asked answerable and unanswerable questions about the video. The training resulted in fewer errors and more rejections to unanswerable questions. Analysis of response diagnosticity indicated that responses made by the trained group were more likely to be correct responses to answerable questions. A second study showed that these findings were not due to awareness of the presence of unanswerable questions. The procedure has potential as a supplement when questioning is pursued.