Mistakes in eyewitness identification frequently occur when incorrect associations are made between a familiar person and the actions of another person. The present research demonstrates that actors do not need to be similar in appearance for such conjunction errors to occur. The actors can, in fact, be very different in appearance, even different sexes. Participants attempted to remember a series of brief everyday events, each involving an actor performing an action. Increases in actor similarity led to increases in conjunction errors in which participants incorrectly associated a familiar actor with a familiar action that was actually performed by someone else, but conjunction errors frequently occurred even when the familiar actor was of a different sex than the original actor, arguing against the hypothesis that these conjunction errors are due solely to mistaken identity.Event memory depends not only on accurate memory for the individual features of the event (e.g., a person and an action), but also on accurate memory for the relationships among these features (e.g., which person performed which action). Accurate event memory, therefore, relies on binding together different features of an event into an integrated event representation.Many apparent examples of binding errors in event memory are found in the eyewitness testimony literature on unconscious transference (e.g., Loftus, 1976;Perfect & Harris, 2003;Ross, Ceci, Dunning, & Toglia, 1994). In unconscious transference, an eyewitness associates a familiar person with a crime performed by somebody else. Thus, the eyewitness may correctly remember having seen both the person and the crime, but may have incorrectly associated the innocent person with the crime.Although this phenomenon is referred to as unconscious, Ross et al. (1994) suggested that unconscious transference may actually be caused in large part by a process of "conscious inference" in which "the witness misperceives the assailant as the bystander and thinks that the assailant and the bystander are the same person who was seen in two different places" (p. 929). Unconscious transference is therefore hypothesized to occur during encoding when, upon encountering the assailant, the eyewitness believes that this is the same person as an innocent bystander encountered earlier. This theory suggests that the actor and the innocent person may need to be very similar in appearance in order for people to exhibit unconscious transference. As evidence for this theory, Ross et al. (1994) demonstrated that most of their participants who made transference errors did indeed think the perpetrator and bystander were the same person. Furthermore, when participants were told that the perpetrator and bystander were not the same person, unconscious transference was eliminated. An alternative explanation for unconscious transference, however, comes from research on associative recognition (e.g., Light, Patterson, Chung, & Healy, 2004). In this paradigm, participants are presented with word pairs (e.g., bread-...
