D. Stephen Lindsay

The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory for source

We examined the possibility that eyewitness suggestibility reflects failures of the processes by which people normally discriminate between memories derived from different sources. To test this hypothesis, misled and control subjects were tested either with a yes/no recognition test or with a “source monitoring” test designed to orient subjects to attend to information about the sources of their memories. The results demonstrate that suggestibility effects obtained with a recognition test can be eliminated by orienting subjects toward thinking about the sources of their memories while taking the test. Our findings indicate that although misled subjects are capable of identifying the source of their memories of misleading suggestions, they nonetheless sometimes misidentify them as memories derived from the original event. The extent to which such errors reflect genuine memory confusions (produced, for example, by lax judgment criteria) or conscious misattributions (perhaps due to demand characteristics) remains to be specified.

A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories

Because image-enhancing technology is readily available, people are frequently exposed to doctored images. However, in prior research on how adults can be led to report false childhood memories, subjects have typically been exposed to personalized and detailed narratives describing false events. Instead, we exposed 20 subjects to a false childhood event via a fake photograph and imagery instructions. Over three interviews, subjects thought about a photograph showing them on a hot air balloon ride and tried to recall the event by using guided-imagery exercises. Fifty percent of the subjects created complete or partial false memories. The results bear on ways in which false memories can be created and also have practical implications for those involved in clinical and legal settings.

Item-specific control of automatic processes: Stroop process dissociations

The influence of word reading on Stroop color naming decreases as a function of the proportion of test items that are incongruent. This proportion-congruent effect is usually ascribed to strategies (e.g., maintaining task set) that operate at a general level to moderate the extent to which participants are influenced by word reading. However, in three experiments, effects at the level of specific items were found. Interference and facilitation were smaller for color names usually presented in an incongruent color than for color names usually presented in their congruent colors. This item-specific proportioncongruent manipulation affected the process dissociation (PD) estimate of the influence of word-reading processes but not that of color-naming processes. The results (1) indicate that item-specific, as opposed to general, mechanisms can reduce the influence of word-reading processes on Stroop performance and (2) demonstrate the PD procedure’s utility in studying Stroop phenomena.

Children's eyewitness reports after exposure to misinformation from parents.

This study examined how misleading suggestions from parents influenced childrens eyewitness reports. Children (3 to 8 years old) participated in science demonstrations, listened to their parents read a story that described experienced and nonexperienced events, and subsequently discussed the science experience in two follow-up interviews. Many children described fictitious events in response to open-ended prompts, and there were no age differences in suggestibility during this phase of the interview. Accuracy declined markedly in response to direct questions, especially for the younger children. Although the older children retracted many of their false reports after receiving source-monitoring instructions, the younger children did not. Path analyses indicated that acquiescence, free recall, and source monitoring all contribute to mediating patterns of suggestibility across age. Results indicate that judgments about the accuracy of childrens testimony must consider the possibility of exposure to misinformation prior to formal interviews.

The process-dissociation procedure and similarity : Defining and estimating recollection and familiarity in recognition memory

In this article, we have two objectives. One aim is to demonstrate that estimates of the contributions of recollection and familiarity to recognition memory judgments obtained with Jacobys (1991) two-study-list processdissociation (PD) procedure are dramatically affected by the discriminability of the two study lists. Our more grand, theoretical aim is to argue that rather than being viewed as evidence of measurement error in the two-study-list PD procedure, our findings can be interpreted as support for a functionalist approach to recognition memory. The proposed approach combines aspects of dual-process theories (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981; Mandler, 1980) with aspects of global memory models (Gillund & Shiffiin, 1984; Murdock, 1982) and, more generally, with theories in which memory for an event consists of multiple records of the component processes that gave rise to and constituted the experience of that event (e.g., the multiple-entry, modular memory system [MEM] model of Johnson, 1983, 1990, 1992, or the transfer-appropriate processing approach articulated by Roe

Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals

The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.

Assessing the accuracy of young children's reports: Lessons from the investigation of child sexual abuse

Abstract Procedures for investigating allegations of child sexual abuse have come under intense scrutiny by social critics, researchers, and the courts. Concerns about under- and overidentification have fueled two approaches to evaluation: the indicator approach, which seeks to specify symptoms that can be used to identify sexually abused children, and the assessments approach, which analyzes conditions associated with accurate versus inaccurate event reports. A review of research from these approaches reveals a number of gaps between empirical results and commonly cited aphorisms about how to discriminate between true and false reports. Four principles for designing studies and communicating findings are suggested to improve the interface between research and practice.

Remembering and knowing in context

Abstract Prior to a recognition test, subjects studied one set of words in a medium level of processing (LOP) task and another set of words in either a shallow or deep LOP task. Medium items received more remember judgments (and fewer know judgments) when mixed with shallow than with deep items (Experiment 1)—even when a basis was required for each remember judgment (Experiment 4). These effects were due to the test-list context: judgments for medium items were equivalent for the two groups when only the medium items were presented at test (Experiment 2). The relative weighting subjects assigned to particular kinds of recollected information as the basis of their remember judgments was affected by list context (Experiment 4), but their ability to remember list source was not (Experiment 3). The test-list context appears to have influenced subjects’ functional definitions of remembering and knowing rather than the contents of their recollections.

Reality Monitoring and Suggestibility: Children’s Ability to Discriminate Among Memories From Different Sources

Throughout the relatively brief period since the invention of the modern Romantic concept of childhood in the nineteenth century (Aries, 1962, cited in Kessen, 1979), and throughout the even briefer history of the science of psychology, the idea of young children serving as eyewitnesses in courts of law has run counter to our notions of children’s capabilities (Goodman, 1984). Now, in the mid-1980s, children’s competency as eyewitnesses has become an important issue, as children more and more frequently are the victims of reported crimes and as psychologists become increasingly concerned with conducting research and constructing theory within “ecologically valid” contexts and constraints (e.g., Bahrick & Karis, 1982; Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Neisser, 1976, 1982, 1985).

Replication in Psychological Science

psychological science, the field, continue to struggle with the challenge of establishing interesting and important and replicable phenomena. As I often tell my students, “If scientific psychology was easy, everyone would do it.” We can take some comfort in knowing that other sciences, too, face similar challenges (e.g., Begley & Ellis, 2012). But our business is with psychology. In August of this year, Science published a fascinating article by Brian Nosek and 269 coauthors (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). They reported direct replication attempts of 100 experiments published in prestigious psychology journals in 2008, including experiments reported in 39 articles in Psychological Science. Although I expect there is room to critique some of the replications, the article strikes me as a terrific piece of work, and I recommend reading it (and giving it to students). For each experiment, researchers prespecified a benchmark finding. On average, the replications had statistical power of .90+ to detect effects of the sizes obtained in the original studies, but fewer than half of them yielded a statistically significant effect. As Nosek and his coauthors made clear, even ideal replications of ideal studies are expected to fail some of the time (Francis, 2012), and failure to replicate a previously observed effect can arise from differences between the original and replication studies and hence do not necessarily indicate flaws in the original study (Maxwell, Lau, & Howard, 2015; Stroebe & Strack, 2014). Still, it seems likely that psychology journals have too often reported spurious effects arising from Type I errors (e.g., Francis, 2014).... Language: en