Features and feedback: Enhancing metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval reduces source-monitoring errors.

Abstract

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.

Retrieval can increase or decrease suggestibility depending on how memory is tested: The importance of source complexity

“…In list learning studies, information in the two sources (e.g., word lists 1 and 2) virtually never overlaps (for an exception, see Dodhia & Metcalfe, 1999), such that the two learning sources contain unique items (i.e., items studied in list 1 never appear in list 2 and vice versa, e.g., Bodner & Lindsay, 2003;Dobbins & McCarthy, 2008;Dodson, Holland, & Shimamura, 1998). However, in misinformation studies, items in the two sources almost always contain some degree of overlap, because the misinformation is presented in the context of the original event (Lane, Roussel, Villa, & Morita, 2007;Lindsay & Johnson, 1989;Zaragoza & Lane, 1998).…”

A ‘middle road’ approach to bridging the basic–applied divide in eyewitness identification research

“…Christiaansen & Ochalek, 1983;Eakin, Schreiber, & Sergent-Marshall, 2003) and source monitoring errors (e.g. Lane, Roussel, Villa, & Morita, 2007;Lindsay & Johnson, 1989;Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). Thus, researchers in the area did not think it necessary to posit a specialized theory of eyewitness suggestibility, but rather focussed on established fundamental mechanisms of memory.…”

Can corrective feedback improve recognition memory?

“…As Han and Dobbins (2008) noted, feedback might selectively reinforce responses that are based on the use of effective retrieval strategies or might sharpen participants' interpretations of their internal responses to test items such that they glean from these responses information that is diagnostic of oldness or newness (Dodson & Johnson, 1993;Gruppuso, Lindsay, & Kelley, 1997;Jacoby, Yonelinas, & Jennings, 1997;Jennings & Jacoby, 1993). Evidence of just such effects of feedback has been obtained in tasks manipulating participants' interpretations of cognitive fluency (Unkelbach, 2006(Unkelbach, , 2007 and on source-monitoring performance in an eyewitness suggestibility paradigm (Lane, Roussel, Villa, & Morita, 2007). Benefits of feedback for sensitivity could also conceivably arise in single-process models of recognition memory (e.g., by selectively reinforcing more effective ways of encoding test probes).…”