‘This Is the Person You Selected’: Eyewitnesses' Blindness for Their Own Facial Recognition Decisions

Abstract

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Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory

“…Experiment 1 demonstrated that the misinformation effect could be elicited from participants by telling them they had reported remembering episodic details in a different way from how they had earlier reported remembering those details. Experiment 2 generalized these findings to another memory task, eyewitness identification, and demonstrated that blindness to the manipulation, rather than mere exposure to the manipulation, drives subsequent memory change, consistent with previous theoretical and experimental work (Johansson et al, 2014;Sagana et al, 2014;Tousignant et al, 1986). We call this novel consequence of choice blindness on eyewitness memory memory blindness: When witnesses are exposed to manipulated versions of their own memory reports, they often fail to notice the manipulation, and their memories often change to be consistent with those altered reports.…”

“…This rate of change to the target face is significantly greater than we would expect by chance, χ 2 (1, N = 94) = 13.58, p < .001. (Sagana et al, 2014). When participants detected the misinformation, their responses were similar to those when the misinformation was not presented at all.…”

“…Given the limitations of our measure of detection in Experiment 1, one important addition to Experiment 2 was the inclusion of a more precise measure of concurrent detection, which allowed us to examine whether any of the observed effects were due to exposure to the choice blindness manipulation per se, or instead were due to participants' failure to detect such a manipulation (Sagana et al, 2014). Additionally, in Experiment 2 we sought to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by using a different memory task; rather than testing their memories for the episodic details of a witnessed event, in Experiment 2 we tested participants' abilities to identify a suspect from a lineup.…”

“…That is, if people are misled about their own previous memory reports, will that manipulation affect their future memories? To our knowledge, only one published study has examined the subsequent effect that choice blindness has on eyewitness memory (Sagana, Sauerland, & Merckelbach, 2014). The researchers found that participants were concurrently blind to changes in their suspect identifications between 33 % and 68 % of the time, depending in part on the amount of time between when participants first made an identification and when they were misled about that identification (see below).…”

“…Misinformation has the greatest influence on participants' memories when it is presented after a long retention interval and immediately prior to a memory test, since the original memory has decayed, whereas the misinformation is fresh (Loftus et al, 1978). A parallel effect could be found for choice blindness; after a longer delay, participants might have more ambiguous memories for their choices, and when asked to justify their choices, they may rely more on a constructive process of evaluating plausible reasons why they may have made a given choice (Bem, 1972;Johansson, Hall, Sikström, Tärning, & Lind, 2006;Sagana et al, 2014). Thus, for the present studies, we included a longer retention interval between the original event and the presentation of misinformation.…”