Comparing the influence of directly vs. indirectly encountered post-event misinformation on eyewitness remembering

The influence of social, para‐social, and nonsocial misleading post‐event sources on memory performance

“…Similar impact of a mock collaborator was demonstrated by Gabbert, Memon, Allan, and Wright () and Blank et al () who used video clips as the original to‐be‐remembered material. Notably, in all experiments performed in the social contagion paradigm, the final memory test was filled out by the participants in private and had a written form, thus precluding public conformity as a possible explanation.…”

“…Our results are similar to those by Meade and Roediger (, Experiment 4), who did not obtain a different misinformation effect between conditions with a confederate and written protocols. Similarly, Blank et al () did not note any differences between such conditions as regards the number of correct answers. Also, in a way, our results are similar to those obtained by Echterhoff, Hirst, and Hussy (, Experiments 3 and 4) who compared the rate of misled answers between participants warned in an explicit but impersonal way (“The description of the video you read in the beginning contained some details that were not depicted in the video…”) and in a social way (“The description of the event is based on what a neighbor of Betty's told a local news reporter….”).…”

“…Of particular interest for the present research is the form in which the post‐event information is introduced: a written narrative seemingly summarizing the original video clip (e.g., Frost, Ingraham, & Wilson, ), a narrative delivered via audio recording (e.g., Blank, ; Vornik, Sharman, & Garry, ), questions containing misleading presuppositions (e.g., Loftus et al, ), misleading pictures (e.g., Pezdek, ), or videos (e.g., Itsukushima, Nishi, Maruyama, & Takahashi, ). However, in the vast majority of research of this kind, misleading post‐event information was introduced impersonally (or indirectly, as Blank et al, , put it); that is, the participants were presented with some sort of material, usually written, and they had to familiarize themselves with it individually.…”

“…Many factors influencing the magnitude of the misinformation effect have been identified, but most of them, like the time intervals between the three parts of the experiment (e.g., Loftus et al, , Experiment 3) or the plausibility of the post‐event information (e.g., Pezdek, Finger, & Hodge, ), do not apply here, as these factors are held constant among experimental conditions, and the only thing differentiating them is the source of misinformation. With regard to that, Blank et al () stated that what may be important here is the credibility of the source.…”

The “memory” misinformation effect may not be caused by memory failures: Exploring memory states of misinformed subjects

“…In the misinformation framework, the pressure is just a piece of paper (although in some research the misinformation is communicated by other people, e.g. Dalton & Daneman, 2006;Szpitalak, Polak, Polczyk & Dukała, 2015;Roediger, Mead & Bergman, 2001;Meade & Roediger, 2002; see also Blank et al, 2013). The second difference is the fact that in experiments on the misinformation effect, participants are usually not confronted with a group and do not need to overtly disagree with others.…”