CREST has produced a new resource (Doctoral Thesis Overview), designed to summarise and highlight the key findings from our CREST PhD’s theses.

Feni Kontogianni’s doctoral research on information elicitation techniques is the subject of the first brief (download, read and share for free here).

The overarching aim of Feni Kontogianni’s doctoral research was to examine the effectiveness of information elicitation techniques. In particular, elicitation techniques designed to enhance reports concerning multi-actor single and repeated events provided by cooperative sources.

Tested across four experiments, Feni measured the effectiveness of using the self-generated cue mnemonic technique (in conjunction with the timeline technique and follow-up open-ended questions) to facilitate recall and reporting of complex events.

CREST have published the key findings from Feni’s research. This new resource gives an overview of the four experiments as well as how this doctoral research informs techniques for intelligence gathering.

You can download the Doctoral Thesis Overview from the resource page here.

Watch this space as we publish more CREST Doctoral Thesis Overviews in the coming year.

Using Self-Generated Cues To Elicit Information

Feni also has created a CREST guide which looks at the Self-Generated Cues Technique and how it can be used (in conjunction with the Timeline Technique) to prompt the interviewee’s memory about a witnessed single event or a series of repeated events.

A self-generated cue might be any idiosyncratic detail of an experienced event that is in some way salient or memorable to that individual. Because of the nature of these cues, they can effectively prompt further recall of associated information.

Why do self-generated cues work as an effective memory aid?
Because details of a witnessed event are associated in memory, retrieving one detail often leads to recall of another. The use of this aid at retrieval helps activate the links between related details in memory and, in doing so, facilitates the recall and reporting of more information. If the overlap between the retrieval cue and the original memory is optimised, this will enhance retrieval further.

To find out more, download the guide here: https://crestresearch.ac.uk/resources/using-self-generated-cues-to-elicit-information/

Read about the innovative applied research being undertaken by Early Career Researchers on Security Threats.

We’re proud of the range and quality of all the research CREST carries out to help understand, mitigate and counter security threats to the UK. But we’re especially excited about the new cohort of researchers that we’re developing.

Over the next few months we’ll be publishing new and updated blogs from our CREST funded doctoral researchers. Here’s the latest three blogs we’ve published:

Affect And Emotion In Extremist Discourse
Affect and emotion seem to be key driving forces in extremist discourse and terror activities. In her PhD research, Kristine Endsjøis looking at the role of emotion in persuasion and the affective processes that drive extremist discourse.
Read about Kristine’s research here.

Increasing Self-Disclosure in Interviews
Third year doctoral researcher Christina Winters explains how interview context and interpersonal tactics can produce more information about job candidates in sensitive roles.
Read about Christina’s research here.

Is nonverbal mimicry an important tool in eliciting information?
First year doctoral researcher Abbie Maroño is investigating the effects of interpersonal closeness on nonverbal mimicry during face-to-face interactions.
Read about Abbie’s research here.

You can read all the blogs in the ECR series here: https://crestresearch.ac.uk/tag/ecr-series/

The final projects to come out of CREST’s 2019 commissioning call have been announced.

In addition to long-term research projects, CREST commissions six- and twelve-month projects to react to new and emerging requirements of its funders. CREST offered £1.12m to fund innovative proposals within this latest round of commissioning.

After a rigorous and independent review process, the successful projects were selected from more than 80 applications. The final three projects announced this month were:

Inoculating against the spread of Islamophobic and extremist Islamist disinformation 
Led by Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol), this project takes a different approach by examining the efficacy of inoculation against misinformation.

Understanding the role of individual differences in the adoption, use and exploitation of smart home technology
This project, led by Emma Williams (University of Bristol), uses home-based IoT technology and cyber-enabled crime as a basis to explore the relationship between individual differences in the adoption and use of new technology, and the exploitation of such technologies for nefarious purposes.

Rapport building: Culture and online vs. in-person interviews
Examining how rapport is built between people of different culture backgrounds, across online and in-person interactions is the focus of this project led by Dr. Ewout Meijer (Maastricht University). Using Hall’s (1976) theory on low- and high-context communication cultures, this project will examine the effect of culture on rapport-building in investigative interviewing scenarios.

To see all the 2019 CREST commissioned projects go to: www.crestresearch.ac.uk/projects/.