Although the suggestibility of eyewitness memory is well documented, previous studies have not clearly established the extent to which misled Ss might come to believe they actually remember seeing the suggested details they report. To assess whether Ss confuse misleading suggestions for their "real memories" of a witnessed event, Ss were asked specific questions about their memory for the source of suggested items. The results of 5 experiments showed that misled Ss do sometimes come to believe they remember seeing items that were merely suggested to them, a phenomenon we refer to as the source misattribution effect. Nevertheless, the results also showed that the magnitude of this effect varies and that source misattributions are not an inevitable consequence of exposure to suggestions.

We investigated how telling different types of lies may impact memory. Participants studied pictures of objects, and later lied and told the truth about these and new objects once or multiple times by describing them or by denying they had seen them. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their source memory. Results revealed that participants had good memory for having falsely described a never-seen object, but relatively poor memory for having falsely denied seeing a studied object. These results suggest that telling certain types of lies may make a person more likely to forget having lied. In addition, repeated truthful denials of having seen a picture paradoxically increased false memories for having seen it. Thus, telling the truth does not always prevent the possibility of memory distortion.

As previously shown for children and adolescents, stimulant medications alone did not eliminate the academic achievement deficit of ADHD undergraduates.

When an eyewitness makes an identification from a lineup, he or she is asked to provide a confidence statement to help jurors assess credibility. However, these are verbal statements and people must rely on metacognitive processes to correctly interpret them. Recently, Dodson and Dobolyi (2015) argued that a person's interpretation of a witness's verbal confidence is influenced by the diagnosticity of the features used to justify his or her identification. We tested this hypothesis in 2 experiments. Experiment 1 found that, relative to a confidence-only control, participants reduced their ratings of confidence when statements were justified using a facial feature that was shared by lineup members, but not when the feature was unique to the member chosen from the lineup. In Experiment 2, we found that participants integrated across the dimensions of witness confidence and accuracy, even when asked to make separate ratings. Altogether, the results suggest that people readily incorporate contextual information into their interpretations of witnesses' verbal expressions of confidence and evaluations of accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record

Real-life witnesses often encounter complex situations that may prevent them from devoting their full attention to encoding forensically-relevant information about the event. Although prior research has demonstrated that divided attention can impair aspects of event memory, the current study examined the effect of attention during encoding of the event on participants' memory for the source of post-event misleading information. Participants first viewed a slide sequence depicting a theft under full or divided attention conditions. Subsequently, they answered questions about the event that included misleading information, and finally received a source test. Results revealed that Divided Attention participants showed poorer memory for event items and were more likely to misattribute post-event misinformation to the event than were Full Attention participants. The findings suggest that typical laboratory conditions (which allow full deployment of attentional resources during encoding) may underestimate the suggestibility of witnesses.

Three experiments explored the issue of whether enhanced metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval can improve participants' ability to make difficult source discriminations in the context of the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm. The 1st experiment documented differences in phenomenal experience between veridical and false memories. Experiment 2 revealed that drawing participants' attention to these differences by pairing the ratings of the features with instructions about their utility was successful in reducing source misattributions of suggested items to the event. The results of Experiment 3 showed that participants can make online adjustments in the types of evidence used to make source judgments, as participants who received correct feedback during the training portion of the test reduced misattribution errors on the remainder of the test where feedback was not provided. Altogether, these studies suggest that people can discover and benefit from updated knowledge of the types of memorial evidence that discriminate between sources of information in memory.

Purpose. Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that encountering or retrieving suggested information under conditions of limited, rather than full, attentional resources is likely to increase false memory for suggested events. Methods. A typical eyewitness suggestibility paradigm was employed in which participants viewed a slide sequence depicting an office theft, answered misleading questions regarding the theft, and were later tested on their memory for the source of the suggested details. In Expt 1, participants encountered the misinformation under conditions of either divided or full attention, and in Expt 2 participants were given either ample time to make the source judgment or were forced to provide source judgments very quickly. Results. The results of both experiments showed that participants who encountered (Expt 1) or retrieved (Expt 2) misleading suggestions under conditions of limited attentional resources were more likely to misattribute the suggested items to the slides and less likely to remember having encountered the suggestions in the post‐event questions. Conclusions. The results support the hypothesis that limiting attentional resources impairs participants' ability to retrieve source‐specifying information and increases false memory for suggested details.

Witnesses to a crime or an accident perceive that event only once, but they are likely to think or talk about it multiple times. The way in which they review the event may affect their later memory. In particular, some types of review may increase suggestibility if the witness has been exposed to postevent misleading information. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a videotaped crime and then received false suggestions about the event. We found that participants who were then asked to focus on specific details when reviewing the event were more suggestible on a later source memory test than participants asked to review the main points. The findings of Experiment 2 suggest that this effect was not due to a criterion shift at test. These findings indicate that the type of rehearsal engaged in after witnessing an event can have important consequences for memory and, in particular, suggestibility.