Perceived reliability of the avatar depends on who is asking the question
On average, interviewers tended towards perceiving the child avatars as better rather than worse witnesses. Compared with conditions without feedback, in conditions with feedback, participants perceived Avatars to be more reliable and less suggestible and believed that the avatars showed fewer contradictions. These differences were obvious in the second half of the interviews. Unsurprisingly, the proportion of recommended questions and the number of correct details were positively associated with perceived reliability and negatively associated with perceived suggestibility and contradictoriness. The pattern was the opposite for the number of not recommended questions and the number of wrong details. The above results suggest that interviewers were able to have a fairly accurate appraisal of the interview process. To elaborate, based on the predefined algorithms, if the interviewer asked a broad-invitation question (e.g., “Tell me everything you still remember”), the Avatar would respond to this question by retrieving narrative details from their “memory”. Then, if the interviewer would have continued to ask a facilitator question (e.g., “And then?”) and encouraged the Avatar to keep talking based on what they mentioned before, the Avatar would continue to provide more correct details in their responses. Open-ended questions made the avatars draw information from “recall memory” rather than just selecting “yes” or “no” in response to close-ended questions, which could have introduced false details contradicting other information [As succinctly summarized by Denne et al. [