Effects Of Postevent Information Research Articles

Unfamiliar voice identification: Effect of post-event information on accuracy and voice ratings

This study addressed the effect of misleading post-event information (PEI) on voice ratings, identification accuracy, and confidence, as well as the link between verbal recall and accuracy. Participants listened to a dialogue between male and female targets, then read misleading information about voice pitch. Participants engaged in verbal recall, rated voices on a feature checklist, and made a lineup decision. Accuracy rates were low, especially on target-absent lineups. Confidence and accuracy were unrelated, but the number of facts recalled about the voice predicted later lineup accuracy. There was a main effect of misinformation on ratings of target voice pitch, but there was no effect on identification accuracy or confidence ratings. As voice lineup evidence from earwitnesses is used in courts, the findings have potential applied relevance.

Role of arousal states in susceptibility to accept misinformation

The fragile nature of eyewitness memory makes the witnesses susceptible to various sources of post event information. Many factors of individual differences further moderate the impact of misinformation. The experiment reported here attempts to explore the effects of post event information on recognition accuracy of witnessed events, as moderated by the arousal states of energetic arousal, tense arousal, hedonic tone and anger/frustration. Experiment used those participants who scored high on four arousal states and average on rest of the three arousal states. Participants viewed a video clip, depicting a murder, followed by presentation of one week delayed post event information and recognition test for details of the event. Results indicated that participants who were misled retained less number of details of the event than did the participants who were given either consistent or no post event information. High scorer energetic arousal and hedonic tone participants retained more details of the event than did the high scorer tense arousal and anger/frustration participants under all the three post event information conditions. However, high tense arousal and anger/frustration participants’ eyewitness retention dropped more sharply when they were given misleading post event information in comparison to the high energetic arousal and hedonic tone participants. Thus, results of the study indicated a moderating effect of post event information by the arousal states.

The effect of postevent information on eyewitness memory of emotionally stressful events

The effect of postevent information on eyewitness memory of emotionally stressful events

The effect of postevent information on adults' eyewitness reports

AbstractThe present experiment examined the conditions under which adults' reports of an event are influenced by information encountered after the event occurred. Adults were exposed to neutral, leading, and misleading postevent information about a target event 24 hours after that event. Twenty‐four hours after exposure to postevent information, participants were first asked a general, open‐ended question (free recall test procedure) and were then asked a series of specific questions. Some participants were asked to select their response from two possible alternatives (recognition test procedure) and some participants were required to generate their own answers to the same questions (directed recall test procedure). The nature of the original information, the nature of the postevent information, and the specificity of the questioning procedure influenced the number of correct responses and the number of misleading errors that participants made. These findings have important implications for interviewing adult witnesses. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of Postevent Information on Infants′ Memory for a Central Target

In three experiments with 78 infants, we explored the effect of introducing novel information about a central target after a short delay on 6-month-olds′ recognition of the original target, the novel exposure target, and a completely novel one. In all experiments, infants learned to move a particular crib mobile (the central target) by kicking and then were exposed to a novel mobile (the conflicting postevent information) immediately after training was over. In Experiment 1, memory for the original mobile was unimpaired, but infants treated both the exposure mobile and a completely novel one as if they had actually been present originally. In Experiment 2, only a completely novel mobile was an effective reminder in a reactivation paradigm, indicating that the impact of postevent information was relatively long-lasting and that the failure of the other mobiles to recover the training memory resulted from trace competition at the time of retrieval. In Experiment 3, identical novel information did not proactively affect recognition. Thus, 6-month-olds′ memory of a central target is resistant to impairment by conflicting postevent information after a short delay, but they are highly prone to source misattribution. We propose that postevent information effects are cognitively efficient.

Infants' eyewitness testimony: effects of postevent information on a prior memory representation.

In eyewitness testimony research, postevent information impairs retention of the original event and increases the probability that interpolated information will be identified as part of the original event. The present experiments studied these effects with 3-month-olds. Infants learned to kick to move a particular crib mobile and then were briefly exposed to information about a novel mobile. The novel postevent information impaired recognition of the original mobile when it immediately followed training but not when it was delayed by 1 day. Like adults, infants treated the postevent information as part of the original training event, continuing to do so for at least 2 weeks. We propose that postevent information displaces conflicting information coactive with it in primary memory and creates a new, updated memory token of the event. Once the new token leaves primary memory, however, it is protected; only a copy can be retrieved and modified in the future.

A Developmental Inquiry into the Effects of Postevent Information on Eyewitness Accounts

Abstract Children in the first through eighth grades (n = 128) and college students (n = 32) viewed a film depicting an automobile collision and were subsequently asked to estimate the speed of one of the vehicles. The results indicated that the phrasing of the question significantly affected the subjects' speed estimates. Specifically, subjects at all grade levels provided significantly higher speed estimates when the adverb fast, as opposed to slow, was used. Subjects in the seventh and eighth grades gave higher speed estimates when the verb smashed was used than when hit was used. This latter effect did not occur at other grade levels sampled.