Effects of post-warning specificity on memory performance and confidence in the eyewitness misinformation paradigm

The influence of post-event misinformation on memory is typically constrained by post-warnings (Blank & Launay, 2014), but little is known about the effectiveness of particular features of post-warning, such as their specificity. Experiment 1 compared two levels of post-warning specificity: A general post-warning just stated the presence of misinformation, whereas a specific post-warning identified the test items for which misinformation had been presented earlier. The specific post-warning, but not the general post-warning, eliminated both the misinformation effect and its deleterious impact on memory monitoring (using a classic two-alternative forced-choice recognition procedure). Experiment 2 ruled out an alternative interpretation of these findings and replicated this post-warning specificity pattern using a cued-recall test. In addition to the moderating influence of task representations on misinformation acceptance, we also observed two unexpected facilitative effects on event memory caused by misinformation. Misinformation facilitated event memory during narrative encoding if discrepancies between the event and the narrative were detected (Experiment 1) and during retrieval if a specific post-warning was combined with cued recall (Experiment 2). We interpret the facilitative effect of discrepancy detection within Jacoby, Wahlheim and Kelley’s (2015) recursive-remindings framework on noticing and recollecting change

False memory ≠ false memory: DRM errors are unrelated to the misinformation effect

The DRM method has proved to be a popular and powerful, if controversial, way to study 'false memories'. One reason for the controversy is that the extent to which the DRM effect generalises to other kinds of memory error has been neither satisfactorily established nor subject to much empirical attention. In the present paper we contribute data to this ongoing debate. One hundred and twenty participants took part in a standard misinformation effect experiment, in which they watched some CCTV footage, were exposed to misleading post-event information about events depicted in the footage, and then completed free recall and recognition tests. Participants also completed a DRM test as an ostensibly unrelated filler task. Despite obtaining robust misinformation and DRM effects, there were no correlations between a broad range of misinformation and DRM effect measures (mean r  = -.01). This was not due to reliability issues with our measures or a lack of power. Thus DRM 'false memories' and misinformation effect 'false memories' do not appear to be equivalent

Schema and deviation effects in remembering repeated unfamiliar stories

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Liz Saunders, George Burrows, Anthony Groves, Suzy Wise, and Jana Literakova for their help with developing the stimuli; Vanessa Davis for assisting at data collection; Chloe Alexis, Pamela Korsah, and Priyanka Mistry for their help with data management; and Nadine Hawkins de Namor and Ewa Skopicz-Radkiewicz for their help with reliability coding.Peer reviewedPublisher PD