Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory

Abstract

Choice blindness refers to the finding that people can often be misled about their own self-reported choices. However, little research has investigated the more long-term effects of choice blindness. We examined whether people would detect alterations to their own memory reports, and whether such alterations could influence participants' memories. Participants viewed slideshows depicting crimes, and then either reported their memories for episodic details of the event (Exp. 1) or identified a suspect from a lineup (Exp. 2). Then we exposed participants to manipulated versions of their memory reports, and later tested their memories a second time. The results indicated that the majority of participants failed to detect the misinformation, and that exposing witnesses to misleading versions of their own memory reports caused their memories to change to be consistent with those reports. These experiments have implications for eyewitness memory.

Misremembering pain: A memory blindness approach to adding a better end

“…However, participants who concurrently detected the misinformation did not exhibit a reduction in their pain ratings. These findings are consistent with past research demonstrating that people can be led to misremember their own reports on their internal states (Merckelbach et al, 2018), that choice blindness can have lasting effects for memory (i.e., memory blindness; Cochran et al, 2016;Stille et al, 2017), and that when people detect the discrepancy between misinformation and facts, they are less likely to be swayed by the misinformation (Tousignant, Hall, & Loftus, 1986). These findings add to the literature by demonstrating that memory blindness can be found in memory for a painful, lived experience, not just in symptoms on a checklist.…”

“…The choice blindness paradigm, which is typically tested in the context of short-term attitude change, has recently been extended into studies on memory, in which researchers investigate whether choice blindness can lead to memory change (Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, & Loftus, 2016;Stille, Norin, & Sikström, 2017). In one such experiment, participants watched a simulated crime and were then asked to answer questions about the event, such as Bhow tall was the thief?^ (Cochran et al, 2016). Later, they were shown their responses to these questions and asked additional follow-up questions.…”

“…The overall sample size was determined on the basis of experience with previous choice blindness research (Cochran et al, 2016). We wanted to recruit a sufficient sample to observe many detectors and nondetectors, in the case that our manipulation had either a high or low rate of detection.…”

Self-delivered misinformation - Merging the choice blindness and misinformation effect paradigms

“…Several previous choice blindness studies have also used continuous scales for ratings [3, 4, 14, 18, 52]. …”

“…Whereas Sagana et al were not able to create a long-term change in recollection, Cochran et al [14] achieve a considerable misinformation effect (see below) as 54% of the non-detectors changed their pick of suspect and of these, 57% changed it in line with the manipulations. The authors interpret this as indication of a more long-term effect of choice blindness on the recollection of a line-up.…”