Postevent Information and Eyewitness Memory

Author(s):  
Kathy Pezdek
2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seema L. Assefi ◽  
Maryanne Garry

Can the simple suggestion that you have consumed alcohol affect your memory for an event? Alcohol placebos affect social behaviors but not nonsocial ones, and have not previously been shown to affect memory. We investigated the effect of alcohol placebos using materials that revealed both the social and the nonsocial influences of memory. Subjects drank plain tonic water, but half were told it was a vodka and tonic; then all subjects took part in an eyewitness memory experiment. Subjects who were told they drank alcohol were more swayed by misleading postevent information than were those who were told they drank tonic water, and were also more confident about the accuracy of their responses. Our results show that the mere suggestion of alcohol consumption may make subjects more susceptible to misleading information and inappropriately confident. These results also provide additional confirmation that eyewitness memory is influenced by both nonsocial and social factors.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Kimbrough ◽  
Brian H. Bornstein ◽  
Heather Bryden

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Philip Kaesler ◽  
John C Dunn ◽  
Keith Ransom ◽  
Carolyn Semmler

The debate regarding the best way to test and measure eyewitness memory has dominated the eyewitness literature for more than thirty years. We argue that to resolve this debate requires the development and application of appropriate measurement models. In this study we develop models of simultaneous and sequential lineup presentations and use these to compare the procedures in terms of discriminability and response bias. We tested a key prediction of the diagnostic feature detection hypothesis that discriminability should be greater for simultaneous than sequential lineups. We fit the models to the corpus of studies originally described by Palmer and Brewer (2012, Law and Human Behavior, 36(3), 247-255) and to data from a new experiment. The results of both investigations showed that discriminability did not differ between the two procedures, while responses were more conservative for sequential presentation compared to simultaneous presentation. We conclude that the two procedures do not differ in the efficiency with which they allow eyewitness memory to be expressed. We discuss the implications of this for the diagnostic feature detection hypothesis and other sequential lineup procedures used in current jurisdictions.


Author(s):  
Chantal Chevroulet ◽  
Helen M. Paterson ◽  
Angus Yu ◽  
Emily Chew ◽  
Richard I. Kemp
Keyword(s):  

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