Retrieval enhances eyewitness suggestibility to misinformation in free and cued recall.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied Retrieval Enhances Eyewitness Suggestibility to Misinformation in Free and Cued Recall

Recalling a witnessed event increases eyewitness suggestibility: the reversed testing effect.

People's later memory of an event can be altered by exposure to misinformation about that event. The typical misinformation paradigm, however, does not include a recall test prior to the introduction of misinformation, contrary to what real-life eyewitnesses encounter when they report to a 911 operator or crime-scene officer. Because retrieval is a powerful memory enhancer (the testing effect),...

Age differences in eyewitness memory for a realistic event.

OBJECTIVES To better understand the effects of misinformation on eyewitnesses of different ages, older and younger adults experienced an event under intentional and incidental learning conditions in a naturalistic experiment using multiple memory tests. METHOD Following exposure to the event, which was a brief interruption of a group testing session, participants completed several memory test...

Paradoxical effects of testing: retrieval enhances both accurate recall and suggestibility in eyewitnesses.

Although retrieval practice typically enhances memory retention, it can also impair subsequent eyewitness memory accuracy (Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). Specifically, participants who had taken an initial test about a witnessed event were more likely than nontested participants to recall subsequently encountered misinformation—an effect we called retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES). Here...

Retrieval does not always enhance suggestibility: testing can improve witness identification performance.

Verbally recalling the appearance of a perpetrator and the details of an event can sometimes hinder later eyewitness memory performance. In two experiments, we investigated the effects of verbally recalling a face on people's ability to resist subsequent misinformation about that face. Participants watched a video of a theft and then completed either a recall test or a distractor activity. Afte...