Time to rewrite your autobiography?

Autobiographical memory is the “diary that we all carry about” said Oscar Wilde. Autobiographical memory defines us. And because autobiographical memory is the foundation on which we build our identity, we like to believe that our memories are accurate, comprehensive and robust. Anything else would challenge our sense of self. But over the previous decade, psychological scientists have shown that autobiographical memory can be inexact, sketchy and frail. Various suggestive techniques can encourage people to generate memories of whole events that never happened. And these illusory memories are often held with great confidence, emotion, clarity, and vividness—but they are not real. In this article, we discuss research showing that suggestion can create false memories and change our autobiography

Digitally manipulating memory : effects of doctored videos and imagination in distorting beliefs and memories

In prior research on false autobiographical beliefs and memories, subjects have been asked to imagine fictional events and they have been exposed to false evidence that indicates the fictional events occurred. But what are the relative contributions of imagination and false evidence toward false belief and memory construction? Subjects observed and copied various simple actions, then viewed doctored videos that suggested they had performed extra actions, and they imagined performing some of those and some other actions. Subjects returned two weeks later for a memory test. False evidence or imagination alone was often sufficient to cause belief and memory distortions; the two techniques in combination appeared to have additive or even superadditive effects. The results bear on the mechanisms underlying false beliefs and memories, and we propose legal and clinical applications of these findings

Creating fair lineups for suspects with distinctive features

In their descriptions, eyewitnesses often refer to a culprit's distinctive facial features. However, in a police lineup, selecting the only member with the described distinctive feature is unfair to the suspect and provides the police with little further information. For fair and informative lineups, the distinctive feature should be either replicated across foils or concealed on the target. In the present experiments, replication produced more correct identifications in target-present lineups—without increasing the incorrect identification of foils in target-absent lineups—than did concealment. This pattern, and only this pattern, is predicted by the hybrid-similarity model of recognition

Anchoring effects in the development of false childhood memories

When people receive descriptions or doctored photos of events that never happened, they often come to remember those events. But if people receive both a description and a doctored photo, does the order in which they receive the information matter? We asked people to consider a description and a doctored photograph of a childhood hot air balloon ride, and we varied which medium they saw first. People who saw a description first reported more false images and memories than people who saw a photo first, a result that fits with an anchoring account of false childhood memories

How the timing of police evidence disclosure impacts custodial legal advice

Presently, the police in England and Wales disclose their evidence at different points during the arrest and detention of a suspect. While the courts have not objected to this, past field research suggests that lawyers can only advise their clients accurately when the police disclose their evidence before the police interview. To examine this from a law – psychology perspective, we recruited 100 criminal defence lawyers to participate in an online study. Lawyers read fictional scenarios and provided custodial legal advice to a hypothetical client (Christopher) when given either pre-interview disclosure or disclosure at various points during the police interview (early, gradually, or late). Lawyers given pre-interview disclosure provided considerably more informed legal advice compared to those who were only provided with disclosure during the hypothetical police interview. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper provides further evidence that pre-interview disclosure is essential for lawyers to deliver case-specific legal advice to suspects

Truth-tellers stand the test of time and contradict evidence less than liars, even months after a crime

When deceptive suspects are unaware of the evidence the police hold against them, they contradict that evidence more than truthful suspects do – a useful cue to deception. But given that, over time, truthful suspects might forget the past and also contradict the evidence, how effective are lie detection techniques that rely on such inconsistencies when suspects are questioned months after a crime? In Experiment 1, people committed a theft (liars) or a benign activity (truth-tellers) in a university bookshop. Shortly after or two months later, we questioned them about their bookshop visit without informing them of the evidence implicating them in the theft. Though truth-tellers contradicted some evidence after both time delays, liars always contradicted the evidence more than did truth-tellers. In Experiment 2, we presented the mock suspects’ responses to an independent group of laypeople and asked them to rate how deceptive the suspects were. Laypeople rated liars as more deceptive than truth-tellers after both time delays, but also rated truth-tellers questioned two months after the crime as more deceptive than truth-tellers questioned shortly after the crime. These findings suggest that liars’ tendency to distance themselves from a crime might outweigh any memory decay that truth-tellers experience in the two months following a crime. As a result, the extent of a suspect’s contradictions with the evidence could still be diagnostic of deception even after an extended time delay

Strategic disclosure of evidence : perspectives from psychology and law

The police frequently present their evidence to suspects in investigative interviews. Accordingly, psychologists have developed strategic ways in which the police may present evidence to catch suspects lying or to elicit more information from suspects. While research in psychology continues to illustrate the effectiveness of strategic evidence disclosure tactics in lie detection, lawyers and legal research challenge these very tactics as undermining fair trial defense rights. Legal research is alive to the problems associated with strategically disclosing evidence to a suspect, such as preventing lawyers from advising the suspect effectively, increasing custodial pressure for the suspect, and worsening working relations between lawyers and police. This paper brings together the opposing research and arguments from the two disciplines of psychology and law, and suggests a new way forward for future research and policy on how the police should disclose evidence

Behind closed doors : live observations of current police station disclosure practices and lawyer-client consultations

Drawing on recent observational fieldwork as well as existing research studies in the fields of law and of psychology, this article examines the nature of police practices in the disclosure of evidence before and during custodial interviews of legally represented suspects. Whilst police pre-interview disclosure to lawyers was a fixed practice, the format of disclosure varied and lawyers were rarely permitted to inspect the evidence, relying instead on the officer’s account. Disclosure was sometimes provided in stages, either as a deliberate tactic or when evidence was lacking. Officers occasionally exaggerated the strength of their case to suspects and resisted providing more detail to lawyers – an approach that seemed designed to elicit an admission from the suspect. In line with past research, lawyers relied on the evidence that police disclosed when advising clients before the interview and occasionally argued with the police for more disclosure. Taken together, these findings suggest that police are complying with the minimum disclosure requirements set out by legislation, and that police may be more open with lawyers than previous research suggests. Some of our findings warrant concern, however, and raise questions about risks to vulnerable suspects in custody and risks to suspects without legal representation

De-constructing rich false memories of committing crime : commentary on Shaw and Porter (2015)

For 20 years, scientists have created a range of false autobiographical memories using the “Lost in the mall” paradigm. Recently Shaw and Porter (2015) suggested to adults that, as adolescents, they had committed a crime resulting in a brush with police. Their finding that 70% constructed "rich false memories” is markedly outside the central tendency of the literature, so we considered a counter explanation for Shaw and Porter's results: They failed to distinguish between subjects who appeared to remember (false memories) versus believe the suggestion (false beliefs). We used three different approaches to recode their data. Using Shaw and Porter's approach, we replicated their 70%. Using alternative approaches that distinguish between false beliefs and memories, we found 26-30% of subjects met the criteria for false memories. Moreover, we showed that laypeople’s understanding of remembering better aligns with the alternative coding approaches than with Shaw and Porter’s

Reasons to doubt the reliability of eyewitness memory: Commentary on Wixted, Mickes, and Fisher (2018)

Wixted, Mickes, and Fisher (this issue) take issue with the common trope that eyewitness memory is inherently unreliable. They draw on a large body of mock-crime research and a small number of field studies, which indicate that high-confidence eyewitness reports are usually accurate, at least when memory is uncontaminated and suitable interviewing procedures are used. We agree with the thrust of Wixted et al.’s argument and welcome their invitation to confront the mass underselling of eyewitnesses’ potential reliability. Nevertheless, we argue that there is a comparable risk of overselling eyewitnesses’ reliability. Wixted et al.’s reasoning implies that near-pristine conditions or uncontaminated memories are normative, but there are at least two good reasons to doubt this. First, psychological science does not yet offer a good understanding of how often and when eyewitness interviews might deviate from best practice in ways that compromise the accuracy of witnesses’ reports. Second, witnesses may frequently be exposed to preinterview influences that could corrupt reports obtained in best-practice interviews