When an eyewitness is asked to make a police statement about a crime, memory can be clouded by misinformation—possibly introduced unknowingly by law enforcement, or through erroneous online accounts or news reports—by the time the witness is asked to provide testimony in court, in what researchers call “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility,” or RES.
“There are many cases in which misinformation is introduced unknowingly to people,” says Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
“It could be police, or through friends, or a number of sources. And people can confuse their memories, even if it’s information not specifically pertaining to that witnessed case. For example, if you saw a bank robbery and later saw a movie depicting bank robberies, whatever you remember from that movie—which has nothing to do with the real-life case—can interfere with your ability to recall the real-life case.”
Details of the study are reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
“Misinformation comes from all sorts of sources, especially nowadays with TV news reports trying to compete with people’s accounts on Twitter with what they just saw,” Chan says. “Outlets are trying to compete with these Twitter feeds all the time, so they report something and don’t verify the source of the information.”
“The most surprising finding from this line of research was that... initially recalling that event, somehow increased your susceptibility to misleading information later,” Chan says.
“...testing for memory ...enhances memory for the original information, it also lets you learn new information better,” Chan says.
“...under a situation when you present people with new information that is misleading, it can enhance their learning of that misleading information.”
“I think that because of all this new misinformation that’s floating around, research in this area has even more real world relevance nowadays,” he said.
Reported in Futurity Today Feb 9, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment