Processing resources and eyewitness suggestibility

Abstract

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.

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).…”

Nonprobative photos rapidly lead people to believe claims about their own (and other people’s) pasts

“…First, the effects of nonprobative photos tend to be more powerful for judgments about unfamiliar stimuli (Newman et al, 2012). Second, we wanted to make it difficult for people to encode the events well because the test phase happened soon after the study phase, and there is evidence that well-encoded experiences are less susceptible to the influence of nondiagnostic feelings than are poorly -encoded experiences (Monin, 2003;Zaragoza & Lane, 1998). The final set of animal names was a mix of mammals, reptiles, fish, and birds.…”

Imagination inflation is a fact, not an artifact: A reply to Pezdek and Eddy

“…Later, Belli (1989) showed that McCloskey and Zaragoza's modified test was actually insensitive to memory impairment. In many ways, McCloskey and Zaragoza's most important contribution was to spark renewed interest in the area, the end result being that this new research advanced our knowledge of how postevent suggestions affect memory (Abeles & Morton, 1999;Belli, 1989;Frost, 2000;Lindsay, 1990;Loftus & Hoffman, 1989;Zaragoza & Lane, 1998;Zaragoza & McCloskey, 1989). What we discovered grew quickly, and by leaps and bounds.…”