False memories in forensic psychology: do cognition and brain activity tell the same story?

One of the most important problems in forensic psychology is the impossibility of reliably discriminating between true and false memories when the only prosecution evidence comes from the memory of a witness or a victim. Unfortunately, both children and adults can be persuaded that they have been victims of past criminal acts, usually of a sexual nature. In adults, suggestion often occurs in the context of suggestive therapies based on the belief that traumatic events are repressed, while children come to believe and report events that never occurred as a result of repeated suggestive questioning. Cognitive Researchers have designed false memory paradigms (i.e., misinformation effect, Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, event implantation paradigm) to first form false memories and then determine whether it is possible to reliably differentiate between false and true memories. In the present study, we review the contribution of cognitive research to the formation of false memories and the neuropsychological approaches aimed to discriminate between true and false memories. Based on these results, we analyze the applicability of the cognitive and neuropsychological evidence to the forensic setting.

Normative developmental vs. reverse developmental trends in memory distortion: a framework to investigate the impact of internal and external influences on memory and their relevance to legal decisions

There are two opposing positions regarding the development of memory: the normative developmental position, and the reverse developmental position. The normative position, which has long been the default presupposition, supports the notion that susceptibility to memory distortion, including false memories, decreases with age. In contrast, the concept of "developmental reversals" supports the notion that susceptibility to memory distortion and false memories increases with age. Each perspective finds support from existing theories as well as from research on endogenous and exogenous sources of influence. In a legal context, having an accurate understanding of the developmental course of false memory can contribute on the one hand to mitigating wrongful convictions and, on the other hand, to appreciating the accuracy of children's statements when warranted. This review aims to integrate the existing literature regarding these seemingly opposite developmental courses and construct a framework outlining the conditions under which we may observe one age trend over the other. This entails an examination of the paradigms that have been invoked to support these competing positions, specifically developmental responses to internal vs. external sources of distortion.

The role of experimenter familiarity in children's eyewitness identification

Child eyewitnesses show a high false identification rate on target-absent (TA) lineups despite good performance on target-present (TP) lineups. One explanation is that children feel a social pressure to choose when presented with a TA lineup. We investigated whether experimenter familiarity would reduce social pressure and improve accuracy on TA lineups. Children (5-7 years, N = 120) watched a short video of a staged theft; 1-2 days later they completed a TP or TA lineup with a familiar or unfamiliar experimenter. Experimenter familiarity had an impact on lineup response in TA lineups only, with more correct 'not there' and fewer 'not sure' responses when the children were familiar with the experimenter. The results provide further evidence to support the social aspect of eyewitness identification decisions in children and provide a possible strategy to improve identification accuracy for those working with children in the criminal justice system.

The Gestural Misinformation Effect in Child Interviews in Switzerland

Gestures embody concepts in the form of universal representations. Researchers have highlighted that social communication often embodies nonverbal behavior. A forensic interviewer’s nonverbal behavior, such as gesturing during an interview, could communicate misleading information and may cause inaccuracies in the interviewees’ testimonies. The current study was conducted in Switzerland and included 108 child participants, in three age groups (a younger sample aged 6–9 years, n = 32) (a middle sample aged 10–11 years, n = 40) and an older sample aged 12–13 years, n = 36). Participants viewed a video and completed an interview about the video, individually, immediately after. During the questioning, the interviewer deliberately misled the interviewees with nonverbal gestures. The results showed that 95 children were misled by at least one gesture and that gestures led to a significant decrease in accuracy. Children also incorporated misleading gestures and reported false information; adding to existing evidence that misinformation can also be communicated through nonverbal gestures. Our findings demonstrate the negative influence of misleading gestures in child eyewitness interviews and provide more evidence for the robustness of the gestural misinformation effect, reported in previous research.

Novel Approaches and Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on False Memory and Deception

The DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) paradigm produces robust false memories of non-presented critical words. After studying a thematic word list (e.g., bed, rest, and pillow) participants falsely remember the critical item "sleep." We report two false memory experiments. Study One introduces a novel use of the lexical decision task (LDT) to prime critical words. Participants see two letter-strings and make timed responses indicating whether they are both words. The word pairs Night-Bed and Dream-Thweeb both prime "sleep" but only one pair contains two words. Our primary purpose is to introduce this new methodology via two pilot experiments. The results, considered preliminary, are promising as they indicate that participants were as likely to recognize critical words (false memories) and presented words (true memories) just as when studying thematic lists. Study Two actually employs the standard DRM lists so that semantic priming is in play there as well. The second study, however, uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex during a DRM task which includes a deception phase where participants intentionally lie about critical lures. False and true memories occurred at high levels and activated many of the same brain regions but, compared to true memories, cortical activity was higher for false memories and lies. Accuracy findings are accompanied by confidence and reaction time results. Both investigations suggest that it is difficult to distinguish accurate from inaccurate memories. We explain results in terms of activation-monitoring theory and Fuzzy Trace Theory. We provide real world implications and suggest extending the present research to varying age groups and special populations. A nagging question has not been satisfactorily answered: Could neural pathways exist that signal the presence of false memories and lies? Answering this question will require imaging experiments that focus on regions of distinction such as the anterior prefrontal cortex.

False Memories in Native and Foreign Languages

Human memory is prone to memory errors and distortion. Evidence from studies on cognitive functions in bilinguals indicates that they might be prone to different types of memory errors compared to monolinguals; however, the effect of language in false memories is still understudied. Source monitoring processes required for proper memory functioning, presumably, rely on inhibitory control, which is also heavily utilized by bilinguals. Moreover, it is suggested that thinking in a second language leads to more systematic and deliberate reasoning. All these results lead to expect that bilinguals are more analytical when processing information in their second language overcoming some memory errors depending on the language of information. To test this hypothesis, we run a classical misinformation experiment with an explicit source monitoring task with a sample of Russian–English bilinguals. The language of the misinformation presentation did not affect the degree of the misinformation effect between the Russian and English languages. Source monitoring demonstrated an overall higher accuracy for attributions to the English source over the Russian source. Furthermore, analysis on incorrect source attributions showed that when participants misattributed the sources of false information (English or Russian narrative), they favored the Russian source over the not presented condition. Taken together, these results imply that high proficiency in the second language does not affect misinformation and that information processing and memory monitoring in bilinguals can differ depending on the language of the information, which seems to lead to some memory errors and not others.

Lie for Me: Developmental Trends in Acquiescing to a Blatantly False Statement

A pair of studies demonstrates that simply asking children to make a blatantly false accusation in the guise of helping others can result in both immediate and long-term false claims. In the pilot study, the initial willingness to make a blatantly false statement was associated with some children making false statements a week later despite being told that the first interviewer had made mistakes during the initial interview. On a positive note, the majority of participants accurately stated that they did not have first-hand knowledge of their accusation's accuracy. Across both studies, the rate of false accusation rates was high. The main experiment demonstrated that children who were young, possessed the lowest verbal intelligence or who were from the lowest SES homes made the most accusations. These findings illustrate not only the dangers of encouraging children to make false statements, but the ease and durability of making such false statements.

Children's Use of Testimony to Determine Reality Status

Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4- to 8-year-olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality of unfamiliar entities. Children selected the adult for food and the child for toys. Six- and 8-year-olds also selected the adult regarding reality. In Study 2, ninety 4- to 8-year-olds heard conflicting reality information from children and adults. Six- to 8-year-olds endorsed adult and child claims differentially and stated that adults knew more. By age 6, children favor adult testimony about reality over that of children.

Who Is the Better Eyewitness? Sometimes Adults but at Other Times Children

Suggestibility is regarded as a major issue when children testify in court. Many legal professionals and memory researchers view children as inferior witnesses. Although differences in suggestibility exist between children and adults, they are much more complex than is usually assumed. We show that under certain conditions, adults are more susceptible than children to suggestion and false memories. We provide evidence that age-related shifts in suggestibility and false memory appear contingent on how quickly and automatically children and adults make associations when experiencing events. Specifically, when confronted with suggestive information about a related but nonexperienced detail, adults more frequently automatically generate links between items experienced and those already in memory, making them more susceptible to suggestion than children.

Does parental coaching affect children's false reports? Comparing verbal markers of deception

The present study examined differences in children's true and false narratives as a function of parental coaching by comparing the verbal markers associated with deception. Children (N = 65, 4-7 years old) played the same game with an adult stranger over three consecutive days. Parents coached their children to falsely allege that they had played a second game and to generate details for the fabricated event. One week after the last play session, children were interviewed about their experiences. For children with the least amount of parental coaching, true and false reports could be distinguished by multiple verbal markers of deception (e.g., cognitive processes, temporal information, self-references). The fabricated reports of children who spent more time being coaching by a parent resembled their truthful reports. These findings have implications for real-world forensic contexts when children have been coached to make false allegations and fabricate information at the behest of a parent.

The impact of own and others' alcohol consumption on social contagion following a collaborative memory task

When one person alters his or her recollection of an event to be consistent with another person's erroneous account of the same event, social contagion has occurred. In two studies, we examined whether alcohol consumption influences the degree to which people engage in social contagion. In Study 1, participants consumed alcohol, an alcohol placebo, or a soft drink and then completed a collaborative recall test with a confederate who consumed a soft drink. In Study 2, participants consumed a soft drink and then completed a collaborative recall test with a confederate they believed had consumed a soft drink or alcohol (but no alcohol was ever consumed). In both studies, the confederate made scripted errors during the collaborative recall test. On post-collaborative individual recall and recognition tests, participants in both studies engaged in social contagion by including the confederate's errors in their own recollection. In Study 1, the drink participants consumed had no influence on social contagion. In Study 2, participants were less likely to engage in social contagion after collaborating with a confederate who had seemingly consumed alcohol. That same confederate was viewed as less accurate, trustworthy, and credible, which likely made participants less inclined to engage in social contagion.

A Preliminary Analysis of Procedures to Teach Children with Autism to Report Past Behavior

Deficits in reporting past behavior may have implications for a child's social development and safety. Behavioral interpretations of memory and research on do/say correspondence provide valuable strategies to teach reporting past behavior when deficits are observed. The current study examined procedures to teach accurate reporting of past behavior following a delay for two children diagnosed with autism. During baseline, both participants accurately reported past behavior when immediately probed. Neither participant emitted accurate reporting following a delay during end-of-day probes. Treatment procedures included prompting, reinforcement, and fading procedures designed to maintain stimulus control across the delay. Both participants demonstrated accurate reporting of past behavior on delayed probes, including when conducted by a caregiver.

The own-race bias in child and adolescent witnesses

This study investigated the own-race bias in British school children using an eyewitness paradigm. Some 319 participants viewed films of two similar staged thefts, one that depicted a Caucasian culprit and the other an Asian culprit, and then after a delay of 2–3 days, viewed a line-up for each culprit. One hundred and seventy-six of the participants were Caucasian and 143 were Asian. There were also two age groups: 164 were aged 7–9 years and 152 were 12–14 years. There was a significant own-race bias for Caucasian participants from both age groups that resulted in more correct identifications for the own-race culprit from target present line-ups and more false identifications for the target absent line-ups. Asian participants from both age groups showed no own-race bias and performed equally accurately for culprits of both races. Measures of inter-racial contact were associated with correct responses for other-race targets and revealed that the majority of Caucasian participants in the current sample had very little contact with Asians, whereas the majority of Asian participants had high levels of contact with Caucasians.

Blunted cortisol response to acute pre-learning stress prevents misinformation effect in a forced confabulation paradigm

Research examining the effects of stress on false memory formation has been equivocal, partly because of the complex nature of stress-memory interactions. A major factor influencing stress effects on learning is the timing of stress relative to encoding. Previous work has shown that brief stressors administered immediately before learning enhance long-term memory. Thus, we predicted that brief stress immediately before learning would decrease participants' susceptibility to subsequent misinformation and reduce false memory formation. Eighty-four male and female participants submerged their hand in ice cold (stress) or warm (no stress) water for 3min. Immediately afterwards, they viewed an 8-min excerpt from the Disney movie Looking for Miracles. The next day, participants were interviewed and asked several questions about the video, some of which forced them to confabulate responses. Three days and three weeks later, respectively, participants completed a recognition test in the lab and a free recall test via email. Our results revealed a robust misinformation effect, overall, as participants falsely recognized a significant amount of information that they had confabulated during the interview as having occurred in the original video. Stress, overall, did not significantly influence this misinformation effect. However, the misinformation effect was completely absent in stressed participants who exhibited a blunted cortisol response to the stress, for both recognition and recall tests. The complete absence of a misinformation effect in non-responders may lend insight into the interactive roles of autonomic arousal and corticosteroid levels in false memory development.

Interviews of Children in a Portuguese Special Judicial Procedure

Since 2007, alleged victims of child sexual abuse in Portugal have provided evidence in a mandatory "Declarações para Memória Futura" (DMF; English transl. 'Statement for future use') proceeding. In order to protect children from having to testify in court, interviews conducted at the DMF can be used later as trial evidence because the hearings are conducted by judges. The present study examined 137 interviews with 3- to 17-year-olds conducted in several Portuguese criminal courts. Detailed examination of interview transcripts showed that 69% of all questions asked were option-posing questions, 16% were directive questions, 11% were suggestive questions, and only 3% were open-ended prompts. The vast majority of details provided by children were thus obtained using the risky recognition-based prompts (i.e., option posing and suggestive questions) associated with the risks of contaminating and limiting children's informativeness, both potential threats to the credibility of their testimony. There is an urgent need to address this issue and consider the implementation of a scientifically validated structured interview protocol in Portugal. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Last shall be First: How Memory Strength Affects Children's Retrieval

When items are read out of storage during unconstrained recall, how should their memory strengths affect recall order? Commonsense argues that items will present themselves to consciousness in the order of their relative memory strength and that, hence, the read out sequence will be stronger to weaker. In experiments with 6- to 13-year-olds, however, this sequence was never obtained. Dichotomous measures of memory strength (strong vs. weak) showed that weak items were always recalled before strong items. Continuous measures of memory strength showed that the sequence was weaker to stronger to weaker. This pattern, which we term the cognitive triage effect, occurred at all age levels, for a variety of material, with different definitions of memory strength, and became more pronounced with age. Three results suggested that the pattern was not due to a deliberate strength-based ordering strategy: The pattern was observed in children as young as age 6; it was present at the earliest stages of recall; and adults (who also exhibited the pattern) were unaware of what they were doing.

Self-delivered misinformation - Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms

Choice blindness is the failure to detect a discrepancy between a choice and its outcome. The misinformation effect occurs when the recollection of an event changes because new, misleading information about the event is received. The purpose of this study was to merge the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms, and thus examine whether choice blindness can be created for individuals’ recollections of a witnessed event, and whether this will affect their later recollections of the event. Thus, as a way of delivering misinformation the participants ostensibly became their own source of the misleading information. The participants watched a short film and filled out a questionnaire about events shown in the film. Some of their answers were then manipulated using reattachable stickers, which allowed alteration of their original answers. The participants gave justifications for their manipulated choices, and later their recollection of the original event was tested through another questionnaire. Choice blindness was created for a majority of the participants. A majority of the choice blind participants later changed their reported recollection of the event in line with the manipulations, whereas only a small minority of the participants in the control condition changed their recollection. This study provides new information about the misinformation effect, suggesting that this effect also can occur when misinformation is given immediately following presentation of the original stimuli, and about choice blindness and its effects on the recollections of events. The results suggest that memory blindness can be created when people inadvertently supply themselves with misleading information about an event, causing a change in their recollection.

Children's use of sexual body part terms in witness interviews about sexual abuse

For successful prosecution, investigative interviews with child sexual abuse victims need to establish the nature of the alleged offence by determining the body parts that were involved. To date, however, there has been a paucity of research on the extent to which children clearly identify sexual body parts in interviews and how they respond to interviewers' attempts to clarify ambiguous terms. The present study sought to explore children's use of sexual body part terms in field interviews, and their responses to questions aimed at clarifying ambiguous terms. Analyses were conducted on 161 transcripts of field interviews with children aged 4-17 years old, coding for the content of interviewers' questions and of children's responses. Results revealed that many children, even some in their late teens, struggled to provide clear terms for their sexual body parts, either initially, or when asked to provide an alternate term. Questions about body part location or function tended to elicit content appropriate responses in children, irrespective of age. The study discusses the capacity (or willingness) of children to provide clear body part terms in witness interviews and the utility of particular questions. The findings imply a need for caution when following up on the meaning of terms or asking particular clarifying questions, and highlight the importance of childhood education around body parts.

Looking in on the Children: Using Developmental Psychology as a Tool for Hypothesis Testing and Model Building in Social Psychology

The aim of this article is to illustrate how developmental psychology may be used as a tool for hypothesis testing and model building in social psychology. To this end, 5 conceptual themes and I methodological theme linking developmental psychology to social psychology are outlined. Emphasis is put on the potential of each theme to provide insight into the processes underlying the phenomena studied by social psychologists. Examples of how the themes have been used in the past or might be used in the future to inform hypothesis testing and model building in specific areas are provided.

Japanese and Canadian Children's Beliefs about Child and Adult Knowledge: A Case for Developmental Equifinality?

Children do not know everything that adults know, nor do adults know everything that children know. The present research examined the universality of beliefs about child and adult knowledge and their development with 4- and 7-year-old Canadian and Japanese children (N = 96). In both countries, all children were able to identify adult-specific knowledge and only older children displayed beliefs about child-specific knowledge. However, Japanese and Canadian children differed in whether they used their own knowledge in deciding whether a person who knew an item was a child or an adult. In addition, parental and child beliefs were related in Japan but not in Canada. These findings indicate that children growing up in different cultures may take different paths in developing beliefs about age-related knowledge. Implications for theories of socio-cognitive development and learning are discussed.

Perceptions of a Child as Witness: Effects of Leading Questions and the Type of Relationship between Child and Defendant

The effects of type of questioning (leading or nonleading) and type of relationship between child and defendant (defendant is known, i.e., relative, or unknown, i.e., stranger) on mock jurors' perceptions of a child witness were investigated. 92 students read a transcript (a prosecutor questioning a child witness), then answered questions (each on an 11-point scale) regarding their perceptions of the child witness. When the questioning was nonleading (vs leading), the mock jurors judged the certainty of their verdict to be greater ( M = 8.1, SD = 1.9 M = 7.1, SD = 25, respectively) and the child witness to be more credible ( M = 9.0, SD = 1.7; M = 7.9, SD = 2.6, respectively) and honest ( M = 9.8, SD = 1.2; M = 8.7, SD = 2.4, respectively). The type of relationship between the defendant and the child witness did not affect perceptions of the child witness. Possible reasons and implications for the findings are discussed.

Interviewing Child Witnesses: Past and Future

Much of the improvement in child witness interviewing in England and Wales has been based on the findings of psychological research concerning memory and language. However, relatively little research has been conducted on the possible influence of interviewer style or manner. This article reviews the limited previous research on this topic and presents a new study. It seems that an authoritative interviewing style may increase children's errors to suggestive questions.

Forensic Developmental Psychology

We summarize recent developments in the field of forensic developmental psychology that challenge traditional conceptions about the reliability of children's reports. The areas covered involve the disclosure patterns of sexually abused children, the nature of suggestive interviews, developmental differences in suggestibility, and the amount of suggestion required to produce false reports and beliefs.

Representational Constraints on Children's Suggestibility

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 operation-alize 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.

The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation

An experiment demonstrated that false incriminating evidence can lead people to accept guilt for a crime they did not commit Subjects in a fast- or slow-paced reaction time task were accused of damaging a computer by pressing the wrong key All were truly innocent and initially denied the charge A confederate then said she saw the subject hit the key or did not see the subject hit the key Compared with subjects in the slow-pacelno-witness group, those in the fast-pace/witness group were more likely to sign a confession, internalize guilt for the event, and confabulate details in memory consistent with that belief Both legal and conceptual implications are discussed

Valence, Implicated Actor, and Children's Acquiescence to False Suggestions

Although adverse effects of suggestive interviewing on children's accuracy are well documented, it remains unclear as to whether these effects vary depending on the valence of and the actor implicated in suggestions. In this study, 124 3-8-year-olds participated in a classroom activity and were later questioned about positive and negative false details. The interviewer provided positive reinforcement when children acquiesced to suggestions and negative feedback when they did not. Following reinforcement or feedback, young children were comparably suggestible for positive and negative details. With age, resistance to suggestions about negative details emerged first, followed by resistance to suggestions about positive details. Across age, more negative feedback was required to induce acquiescence to negative than positive false details. Finally, children were less willing to acquiesce when they (versus the confederate) were implicated. Findings highlight the interactive effects of valence and children's age on their eyewitness performance in suggestive contexts.

Developmental Differences across Middle Childhood in Memory and Suggestibility for Negative and Positive Events

In the present study, we investigated age differences in children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility for negative and positive events that children often experience during middle childhood. We first examined 216 ratings by children aged 8-12 years of the frequency and intensity of personal negative and positive experiences (Study 1). Based on those ratings, videotapes depicting the most frequent and intense negative (an accident) and positive (a family excursion) events were developed. A new sample of 227 children aged 8-12 years was tested for recognition memory of the videotapes using the three-stage post-event misinformation procedure (Study 2). Compared with 8- to 9-year-olds, 10- to 12-year-olds exhibited less memory malleability and less compliance with false information. Age improvements in recognition accuracy were also evident for children who watched the negative event, but not for those who watched the positive event. Compliance predicted misinformation effects, particularly in regard to peripheral details. Thus, using ecologically representative emotional events, age differences in suggestibility and memory accuracy emerged, especially for negative events.Theoretical and forensic implications concerning children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gating Out Misinformation: Can Young Children Follow Instructions to Ignore False Information?

The current study investigated the effects of misinformation on children's memory reports after practice with the logic-of-opposition instruction at time of test. Four- and 6-year-old children participated in a play event in Session 1. During a two-week delay, parents presented their children with either misinformation or correct information about the play event. Prior to a memory interview in Session 2, some misled children were given a developmentally appropriate logic-of-opposition instruction to not report information provided by their parents. Results indicated that children were misled by the incorrect information, but that the logic-of-opposition instruction aided in the children's retrieval of the original memory, particularly for the 6-year-olds. Implications of the results for memory malleability and social demand effects in children are discussed.

Receiver operating characteristic analysis of age-related changes in lineup performance

In the basic face memory literature, support has been found for the late maturation hypothesis, which holds that face recognition ability is not fully developed until at least adolescence. Support for the late maturation hypothesis in the criminal lineup identification literature, however, has been equivocal because of the analytic approach that has been used to examine age-related changes in identification performance. Recently, receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis was applied for the first time in the adult eyewitness memory literature to examine whether memory sensitivity differs across different types of lineup tests. ROC analysis allows for the separation of memory sensitivity from response bias in the analysis of recognition data. Here, we have made the first ROC-based comparison of adults' and children's (5- and 6-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds) memory performance on lineups by reanalyzing data from Humphries, Holliday, and Flowe (2012). In line with the late maturation hypothesis, memory sensitivity was significantly greater for adults compared with young children. Memory sensitivity for older children was similar to that for adults. The results indicate that the late maturation hypothesis can be generalized to account for age-related performance differences on an eyewitness memory task. The implications for developmental eyewitness memory research are discussed.

Recognition performance level and the magnitude of the misinformation effect in eyewitness memory

The issue of whether misleading postevent information affects performance on the modified recognition test introduced by McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) was examined in a meta-analysis. Results indicated that a misinformation effect can be obtained with the modified test. The meta-analysis also revealed that recognition hit rates are higher in studies that yield a misinformation effect than in studies in which the misinformation effect is not significant. The data from the meta-analysis were also used to assess whether the misinformation effect is related to the length of the retention interval. Results showed that a misinformation effect is more likely to be obtained with long retention intervals, although in the available data there is a confound between the length of the retention interval and the recognition level obtained.

Testing increases suggestibility for narrative-based misinformation but reduces suggestibility for question-based misinformation

A number of recent studies have found that recalling details of an event following its occurrence can increase people's suggestibility to later presented misinformation. However, several other studies have reported the opposite result, whereby earlier retrieval can reduce subsequent eyewitness suggestibility. In the present study, we investigated whether differences in the way misinformation is presented can modulate the effects of testing on suggestibility. Participants watched a video of a robbery and some were questioned about the event immediately afterwards. Later, participants were exposed to misinformation in a narrative (Experiment 1) or in questions (Experiment 2). Consistent with previous studies, we found that testing increased suggestibility when misinformation was presented via a narrative. Remarkably, when misinformation was presented in questions, testing decreased suggestibility.

The role of culture and language in avoiding misinformation: pilot findings

In two pilot studies, we investigate the possibility that patterns in our linguistic environment affect the likelihood of accepting misinformation. Turkish, which marks its verbs for the source of a speaker's evidence (first-hand perception vs. hearsay), was contrasted with English which does not mark its verbs but which, to signal strength of evidence, must employ optional lexical marking. In the first pilot study, Turkish adults were shown to be affected by that language's obligatory evidential markings: their free recall for details of the events changed as a function of the type of the tense-aspect marker in use, and strong evidential markers led to increased levels of suggestibility when employed with misleading questions. In the second pilot study, Turkish- and English-speaking children were shown to be differentially suggestible depending on combinations of evidential markers in the story presented and the evidential marker employed in the misinformation subsequently provided. Together, these two pilot studies show promise in this area of research, which has been ignored by the forensic community and yet would seem to be relevant when interviewing, taking statements, and giving testimony in cross-linguistic settings.

Acceptance and Confidence of Central and Peripheral Misinformation

We examined the memory for central and peripheral information concerning a crime and the acceptance of false information. We also studied eyewitnesses' confidence in their memory. Participants were shown a video depicting a bank robbery and a questionnaire was used to introduce false central and peripheral information. The next day the participants completed a recognition task in which they rated the confidence of their responses. Performance was better for central information and participants registered more false alarms for peripheral contents. The cognitive system's limited attentional capacity and the greater information capacity of central elements may facilitate processing the more important information. The presentation of misinformation seriously impaired eyewitness memory by prompting a more lenient response criterion. Participants were more confident with central than with peripheral information. Eyewitness memory is easily distorted in peripheral aspects but it is more difficult to make mistakes with central information. However, when false information is introduced, errors in central information can be accompanied by high confidence, thus rendering them credible and legally serious.