The Role of Memory Distrust in Cases of Internalised False Confession

This paper reviews the literature on the role of ‘memory distrust’ in cases of internalised false confessions and provides a heuristic model for understanding the antecedents and mechanism involved. It also provides an in‐depth analysis of two real life cases of ‘suspected’ murders involving six convicted persons, five of whom showed evidence of profound memory distrust regarding the alleged offences. The key factors were coercive interviewing, lengthy solitary confinement, contamination, psychological vulnerabilities (both state and trait) and lack of independent support during questioning. The vulnerabilities in such cases typically involve a combination of cognitive (memory flaws, lack of confidence in memory and failure to invoke distinctiveness heuristic), personality (suggestibility and compliance), health problems and motivational (desire and willingness to assist the police) factors. The two cases suggest that the process of internalised false confessions may be conceptualised in terms of five sequential steps: a trigger, plausibility, acceptance, reconstruction and resolution. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the benefits of transient attention across the visual field

There are well-known differences in resolution and performance across the visual field with performance generally better for the lower than the upper visual hemifield. Here we attempted to assess how transient attention summoned by a peripheral precue affects performance across the visual field. Four different attentional precueing tasks were used, varying in difficulty and attentional load. When a single discrimination target was presented (experiments 1 and 2), precues that summon transient attention had very little, if any, effect upon performance. However, when the target was presented among distractors (experiments 3 and 4), the precue had a substantial effect upon discrimination performance. The results showed that asymmetries in visual resolution between the upper and lower hemifields become more pronounced with increasing eccentricity. Furthermore, when the observers performed a precued acuity task with distractors, involving the judgment of the relative position of a small disk within a larger one, there was an asymmetry in the transient attentional effect on discrimination performance; the benefits of transient attention were larger in the upper than in the lower hemifield. Areas in the visual field where visual performance is generally worse thus appear to receive the largest attentional boost when needed. Possible ecological explanations for this are discussed.     

Equivalence classes generated by sequence training

In Experiment 1, 3, adult females were taught with verbal instructions and contingencies to select, in sequence, three arbitrary visual stimuli from an array of five stimuli. After four different sequences were taught, match-to-sample tests assessed emergent conditional relations among all stimuli that had been selected in the same order in the sequences. Subjects' performances indicated development of four stimulus classes, three based on ordinal position and one based on nonselection. Next, match-to-sample training established conditional relations between each of four novel figures and one member of each of the ordinal stimulus classes. Tests confirmed that the classes were equivalence classes, each expanded by one new member. In subsequent sequence tests, the new stimuli were selected in a sequence that was consistent with ordinal class membership. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with 2 different adult females, but the verbal instructions were omitted. Results were similar to Experiment 1, except that extensive review and retesting were required before expansion of the ordinal classes with the novel figures was observed.     

The role of instructions in the transfer of ordinal functions through equivalence classes

In two experiments, adult subjects completed match-to-sample training and testing to establish four equivalence classes of four figures each. Then the subjects were taught one three-position sequence consisting of one stimulus from Class 1, one from Class 2, and one from Class 3. Inclusion of Class 4 stimuli in sequences was never reinforced, but two different stimuli from Class 4 appeared as distractors on each sequence trial. Tests assessed whether subjects would produce novel three-position sequences composed of members of Classes 1 through 3 that had not been used in sequence training. Three subjects in Experiment 1 received instructions about the match-to-sample and sequencing tasks, in addition to training contingencies. All 3 demonstrated equivalence class formation after match-to-sample training. After they were taught one sequence with one member of Classes 1 through 3, none of these subjects produced untrained sequences with other equivalence class members reliably. One additional sequence was trained directly; thereafter 1 subject showed some evidence of transfer of the trained ordinal functions across the remaining members of the equivalence classes, but the other 2 did not. Following a review of equivalence class training and testing and a review of the original sequence training, all 3 subjects produced most of the predicted, untrained sequences on tests. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with 2 adults but omitted all instructions except the minimal ones necessary to initiate responding. Unlike the subjects in Experiment 1, both of these subjects demonstrated virtually complete transfer of ordinal functions through the equivalence classes after direct training on just one sequence composed of one member of Classes 1 through 3.