误导信息效应中年龄差异与自信差异初探

本研究对误导信息效应中不同年龄被试对最初事件再认的表现差异和自信心差异进行了探讨。结果表明:在再认成绩方面,被试对误导项目的错误反应率要高于对控制项目的错误反应率,即产生了误导信息效应,而且老年被试比年轻被试更易受误导信息的影响;在自信心方面,被试不存在年龄差异,即无论是在误导项目上,还是在控制项目上,老年被试和年轻被试对其再认的正确和错误反应有一样高的自信心。     

Practice and feedback effects on the confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness memory

It has been claimed that the lack of a reliable confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness memory stems from eyewitnesses' lack of knowledge concerning their relative expertise. Two studies tested this idea by contrasting the effects of practice alone with practice with feedback in three successive eyewitness tests. Experiment 1 tested recall for events, and Experiment 2 used recognition of faces as test materials. Both studies showed that practice alone did not increase the confidence-accuracy relation, but practice with feedback on relative performance produced robust increases in the confidence-accuracy relation. This suggests that lack of calibration is one factor that causes the reported lack of association between confidence and accuracy for eyewitness memory.     

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Misinformation Effects and Hindsight Bias

The present study examined individual differences in susceptibility to two similar forms of memory distortion: the misinformation effect and hindsight bias. The misinformation effect occurs when individuals witness an event, are provided with misinformation, and recall the original event as containing elements of the misinformation. Hindsight bias occurs when individuals make judgments, are provided with feedback, and recall their original judgments as being more similar to the feedback than they actually were. Seventy-five participants completed a misinformation task, a hindsight bias task, and several individual difference measures related to memory distortions. Working memory capacity was negatively correlated with the misinformation effect and hindsight bias, and the misinformation effect and hindsight bias were negatively correlated with one another. Although the misinformation effect and hindsight bias are measured with similar designs, and both are predicted by working memory capacity, the negative correlation between them suggests these phenomena result from somewhat different processes.     

Practice and feedback effects on the confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness memory

It has been claimed that the lack of a reliable confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness memory stems from eyewitnesses' lack of knowledge concerning their relative expertise. Two studies tested this idea by contrasting the effects of practice alone with practice with feedback in three successive eyewitness tests. Experiment 1 tested recall for events, and Experiment 2 used recognition of faces as test materials. Both studies showed that practice alone did not increase the confidence-accuracy relation, but practice with feedback on relative performance produced robust increases in the confidence-accuracy relation. This suggests that lack of calibration is one factor that causes the reported lack of association between confidence and accuracy for eyewitness memory.     

Using an Individual Differences Approach to Examine Two Distinct Types of Suggestibility Effects

Two studies were conducted to examine relations between suggestibility effects studied in two commonly used research paradigms and a group of individual difference factors that have been theoretically linked to eyewitness suggestibility. In Study 1, we examined relations between the immediate acceptance of misinformation as measured by errors on misleading questions and individual differences in conformity, agreeableness, imagery ability, and memory. As predicted, the immediate acceptance of misinformation was associated with conformity but was not related to imagery ability. In Study 2, we examined relations between delayed retrieval errors produced during a classic misinformation paradigm and the same set of individual difference factors. Consistent with our predictions, delayed misinformation retrieval errors were related to imagery ability but were not related to conformity or agreeableness. Taken together, this predicted pattern of results across the two studies provides some preliminary evidence for an emerging distinction between these two types of suggestibility effects. Underlying theoretical, methodological, and practical issues related to the assessment of suggestibility effects are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characters and their perspectives in narratives describing spatial environments

Summary This paper explores how people represent spatial information involving two perspectives associated with characters who share the same environment. Subjects first learned a narrative that described a scene with eight landmarks surrounding two characters who had the same or different perspective. Afterwards, subjects were given blocks of three-sentence items to be read at their own pace. The first two sentences guided the reader's attention to one character, while the third sentence described a spatial relation between a character and a landmark; subjects had to verify whether the relation was true or false. The results showed that it took longer to verify sentences after learning two-perspective narratives than it did with those of one perspective, and after reading items involving two characters rather than one. Both effects were significant and independent. To explain the perspective effect, it is proposed that subjects build a single perspective-free mental model that is instantiated as a particular perspective when necessary. The character effect has to do with modeling the characters' nonspatial traits. Finally, spatial skills were a predictor of subjects' performance, indicating individual differences in modeling efficiency.     

Who remembers best? Individual differences in memory for events that occurred in a science museum

Individual differences in memory and suggestibility were assessed in an experiment involving 1989 people who attended the Exploratorium, a science museum located in San Francisco. Subjects watched a brief film clip of an assault and later answered questions about it. Approximately half received misinformation about some critical items. Four demographic variables (gender, educational level, age, and occupation) were examined to determine their impact on memory performance. The principle of discrepancy detection predicts that, compared to individuals with a good memory, people who have poor memory to begin with will be relatively suggestible (that is susceptible to misinformation). Some of our findings were consistent with this principle. For example, children (5–10 years) and elderly (over 65) were relatively inaccurate and also relatively suggestible. Other findings were not consistent with the principle, for example the finding that artists and architects were relatively accurate, but they were also highly suggestible.     

Investigating the effects of age and gender on cowitness suggestibility during blame attribution

Despite a large body of research investigating the effects of age and gender on eyewitness suggestibility, the majority of studies has focussed on the impressionability of participants when attempting to recall the presence of items from an event. Very little research has attempted to investigate the effects of age and gender on the suggestibility of eyewitnesses when attempting to attribute blame. Participants (N = 268) viewed and discussed a crime (video) with cowitnesses before giving individual statements. Confederates were used to expose the participants to misinformation during the discussion, suggesting that the wrong bystander was responsible for the offence. Findings indicated that participants who encountered the misinformation were more likely to make a false blame attribution and were more confident in their erroneous judgements. The results found no significant age‐ or gender‐related differences in blame conformity rates; however, male eyewitnesses showed greater levels of overconfidence in their false responses than female participants, after encountering cowitness misinformation.     

Representational constraints on children's suggestibility

ABSTRACT— In a multistage experiment, twelve 4- and 9-year-old children participated in a triad rating task. Their ratings were mapped with multidimensional scaling, from which euclidean distances were computed to operationalize semantic distance between items in target pairs. These children and age-mates then participated in an experiment that employed these target pairs in a story, which was followed by a misinformation manipulation. Analyses linked individual and developmental differences in suggestibility to children's representations of the target items. Semantic proximity was a strong predictor of differences in suggestibility: The closer a suggested distractor was to the original item's representation, the greater was the distractor's suggestive influence. The triad participants' semantic proximity subsequently served as the basis for correctly predicting memory performance in the larger group. Semantic proximity enabled a priori counterintuitive predictions of reverse age-related trends to be confirmed whenever the distance between representations of items in a target pair was greater for younger than for older children.     

New evidence on the suggestibility of memory: the role of retrieval-induced forgetting in misinformation effects

Extending recent work that has demonstrated that the act of remembering can result in the inhibition of related items in memory, the present research examined whether retrieval-induced forgetting could provide a mechanism for explaining misinformation effects. Specifically, the authors found in their first study that the inhibition of critical items rendered the recollection of postevent information more likely in a subsequent test of memory. The authors established in their second study that when guided retrieval practice and final recall tests were separated by 24 hr, retrieval-induced forgetting failed to emerge and misinformation effects were absent. In contrast, a delay of 24 hr between initial encoding and guided retrieval practice produced not only retrieval-induced forgetting but also misinformation effects.     

Adult Age‐Related Differences in the Misinformation Effect for Context‐Consistent and Context‐Inconsistent Objects

The present study examined age‐related differences in the misinformation effect for objects that were consistent or inconsistent with their environmental settings. Young and older adults viewed one of two slide sequences, each containing context‐consistent items (e.g., a blender in a kitchen setting or a saw in a woodshop setting) and context‐inconsistent items (a saw in a kitchen setting or a blender in a woodshop setting). After receiving misinformation through post‐event narratives, participants received tests of yes/no recognition requiring remember/know judgments (Experiments 1–3) and source monitoring (Experiments 2 and 3) for slide details. Although age‐related differences in the misinformation effect were nonreliable, older adults tended to report misinformation as remembered more often than young adults, and source monitoring tests reduced the misinformation effect for both age groups. Misinformation effects were equivalent or larger for inconsistent objects than for consistent objects. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Influence of individual differences in working memory on the continued influence effect of misinformation

ABSTRACT

Misinformation often continues to influence people’s cognition even after being retracted (the continued influence effect of misinformation, CIE). The current research aimed to investigate whether the individual differences in the central executive function of WM and updating could influence the CIE of misinformation with varying relevance. The results showed that the individual differences in central executive function could significantly affect the CIE, especially for the high-relevant misinformation. While the individual differences in the updating ability had a weaker impact on the CIE in general and only negatively related to the CIE for the low-relevant misinformation. The study extends the understanding of the relationship between individual differences and the CIE from previous studies, which is in line with the mental-model-updating hypothesis, and offers a preliminary clue for identifying the persons vulnerable to the CIE of misinformation in the real world.     

Habitual acceptance of misinformation: Examination of individual differences and source attributions

This study identifies individuals who are habitually susceptible to accepting postevent misinformation across testing on three separate events. The results indicate that those individuals identified as habitually susceptible exhibited higher dissociation scores and less of an association between memory accuracy and confidence than did the individuals identified as nonhabitually susceptible. When they were asked to identify the source of the remembered information, similar patterns of source attributions were found for all individuals when they were responding correctly and incorrectly to nonmisinformation and when they were correctly rejecting items of misinformation. Importantly, from a source-monitoring perspective, individuals identified as habitually susceptible demonstrated a different pattern of source attributions than did those classified as nonhabitually susceptible when they were accepting misinformation. Habitually susceptible individuals were as likely to attribute the source of their memory incorrectly to something seen in the experienced event as to attribute it correctly to something read after the fact.     

How eyewitnesses resist misinformation: Social postwarnings and the monitoring of memory characteristics

Previous findings have been equivocal as to whether the postevent misinformation effect on eyewitness memory is reduced by warnings presented after the misinformation (postwarnings). In the present research, social postwarnings, which characterize the postevent source as a low-credibility individual, diminished the misinformation effect in both cued recall and recognition tests. Discrediting the source as being either untrustworthy or incompetent was effective (Experiment 1). Also, postwarned participants rated reality characteristics of their memories more accurately than did participants receiving no or high-credibility information about the postevent source (Experiment 2). A social postwarning yielded the same results as an explicit source-monitoring appeal and led to longer response times for postevent items, relative to a no-warning condition (Experiments 3 and 4). The findings suggest that the reduced misinformation effect was due to more thorough monitoring of memory characteristics by postwarned participants, rather than to a stricter response criterion or to enhanced event memory.     

Can self-reported encoding strategy and recognition skill be diagnostic of performance in eyewitness identifications?

The relationship between 3 witness factors and identification accuracy, as well as calibration and diagnosticity of confidence, was investigated. A total of 384 participants in an eyewitness experiment rated their facial recognition skill, general memory skill, and self-reported encoding strategy on a questionnaire presented after the photo-confrontation. Participants who rated themselves to be good face recognizers showed a slightly higher overall accuracy with a more diagnostic confidence-accuracy relation. Participants who reported that they relied on a holistic encoding strategy were associated with more accurate identifications and a stronger confidence-accuracy relation than those who reported an analytic encoding strategy. Degree of self-reported general memory skill was not diagnostic of identification performance.     

Misled subjects may know more than their performance implies

Many studies have demonstrated that subjects exposed to misleading postevent information are likely to report the misinformation with confidence on subsequent tests of memory for the event. The purpose of the present studies was to determine whether subjects exposed to misleading postevent information come to believe they remember seeing the misinformation at the original event. A second question addressed by the present studies is whether exposure to misinformation reduces subjects' ability to remember the source of items they witnessed at the original event. In two experiments, subjects viewed a slide sequence depicting an event, were subsequently exposed to misleading information or neutral information about selected aspects of the event, and were later tested on their memory for the source of original and misleading details. The results showed that exposure to misinformation did not lead subjects to believe they remembered seeing the misinformation, nor did it reduce subjects' ability to accurately identify the source of originally seen details. The same pattern of results was obtained whether subjects were tested immediately (Experiment 1) or after a 1-day delay (Experiment 2). Collectively, the results suggest that subjects may report misinformation even if they know they do not remember seeing it.     

Attentional responses on an auditory oddball predict false memory susceptibility

Attention and memory are highly integrated processes. Building on prior behavioral investigations, this study assesses the link between individual differences in low-level neural attentional responding and false memory susceptibility on the misinformation effect, a paradigm in which false event memories are induced via misleading post-event information. Twenty-four subjects completed the misinformation effect paradigm after which high-density (256-channel) EEG data was collected as they engaged in an auditory oddball task. Temporal-spatial decomposition was used to extract two attention-related components from the oddball data, the P3b and Classic Slow Wave. The P3b was utilized as an index of individual differences in salient target attentional responding while the slow wave was adopted as an index of variability in task-level sustained attention. Analyses of these components show a significant negative relationship between slow-wave responses to oddball non-targets and perceptual false memory endorsements, suggestive of a link between individual differences in levels of sustained attention and false memory susceptibility. These findings provide the first demonstrated link between individual differences in basic attentional responses and false memory. These results support prior behavioral work linking attention and false memory and highlight the integration between attentional processes and real-world episodic memory.     

Creating new memories that are quickly accessed and confidently held

In two experiments involving a total of 542 subjects, a series of slides depicting a burglary was shown. After the initial event, subjects were exposed to one or more narratives about the event that contained some misinformation or neutral information about four critical details. Finally, subjects were tested on their memories of what they saw, and their reaction times and confidence levels were measured. When subjects took a standard test in which the misinformation item was a possible response option, they responded very quickly and confidently when making this incorrect choice. Misled subjects responded as quickly and confidently to these "unreal" memories as they did to their genuine memories. It does not seem, then, that the misinformation effect arises from a large proportion of subjects who must resolve a conflict between two memories when they are tested, a conflict that would be expected to take time. When subjects took a modified test in which the misinformation item was not a possible response, misled subjects were as accurate as were controls, but they responded more slowly, regardless of whether they ultimately chose the right or wrong option. These findings indicate that misinformation does introduce some form of interference not detected by a simple test of accuracy.     

Confidence and accuracy of lineup selections and rejections: Postdicting rejection accuracy with confidence

Correlation and calibration approaches show meaningful, positive confidence-accuracy relations for witnesses making selections from lineups, but rarely for rejections (Brewer and Wells, 2006, Sauerland and Sporer, 2009). This disparity may reflect the difference between selecting a single photo versus rejecting a set of photos. Participants (N = 101) in two experiments made selections from and rejections of lineups in situations requiring either a single confidence rating about a single face (typical of “choosers”) or a single confidence rating about multiple faces (typical of “nonchoosers”). Mean confidence ratings were significantly higher for accurate versus inaccurate decisions for both selections and rejections when decisions were based on single faces. Single decisions about multiple faces produced no significant difference in confidence between correct and incorrect rejections but a significant difference for selections.     

They Might Be a Liar But They’re My Liar: Source Evaluation and the Prevalence of Misinformation

Even if people acknowledge that misinformation is incorrect after a correction has been presented, their feelings towards the source of the misinformation can remain unchanged. The current study investigated whether participants reduce their support of Republican and Democratic politicians when the prevalence of misinformation disseminated by the politicians appears to be high in comparison to the prevalence of their factual statements. We presented U.S. participants either with (1) equal numbers of false and factual statements from political candidates or (2) disproportionately more false than factual statements. Participants received fact-checks as to whether items were true or false, then rerated both their belief in the statements as well as their feelings towards the candidate. Results indicated that when corrected misinformation was presented alongside equal presentations of affirmed factual statements, participants reduced their belief in the misinformation but did not reduce their feelings towards the politician. However, if there was considerably more misinformation retracted than factual statements affirmed, feelings towards both Republican and Democratic figures were reduced—although the observed effect size was extremely small.