Eyewitness testimony

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of emotional and exercise-induced physiological arousal on memory recall, retrospective source-monitoring ability, and two prospective metamemory judgments: judgments of learning (JOLs) and judgments of source (JOS). Participants were exposed to three emotional arousal conditions (low, medium, and high emotionally arousing video segments and written passages), and three physiological arousal conditions (low, medium, and high levels of exercise, neutral video material, and neutral written passages). After each condition, participants made predictive JOLs about item recall and JOSs about source-monitoring ability at a future time. One week later, cued recall and source-monitoring accuracy of central and peripheral details was tested. Results showed that medium levels of emotional arousal improved cued recall of both central and peripheral details, while high levels of arousal impaired recall of central details. Physiological arousal did not influence any of the dependent variables. JOLs and JOSs were reasonably predictive of recall and source-monitoring accuracy, although patterns of over-and under-estimation were evident. The results are discussed in terms of Easterbrook's cue-utilisation hypothesis, the Yerkes-Dodson law, source-monitoring theory, and Koriat's cue-utilisation theory.