Effects of postwarning specificity on memory performance and confidence in the eyewitness misinformation paradigm

Abstract

The influence of post-event misinformation on memory is typically constrained by post-warnings (Blank & Launay, 2014), but little is known about the effectiveness of particular features of post-warning, such as their specificity. Experiment 1 compared two levels of post-warning specificity: A general post-warning just stated the presence of misinformation, whereas a specific post-warning identified the test items for which misinformation had been presented earlier. The specific post-warning, but not the general post-warning, eliminated both the misinformation effect and its deleterious impact on memory monitoring (using a classic two-alternative forced-choice recognition procedure). Experiment 2 ruled out an alternative interpretation of these findings and replicated this post-warning specificity pattern using a cued-recall test. In addition to the moderating influence of task representations on misinformation acceptance, we also observed two unexpected facilitative effects on event memory caused by misinformation. Misinformation facilitated event memory during narrative encoding if discrepancies between the event and the narrative were detected (Experiment 1) and during retrieval if a specific post-warning was combined with cued recall (Experiment 2). We interpret the facilitative effect of discrepancy detection within Jacoby, Wahlheim and Kelley’s (2015) recursive-remindings framework on noticing and recollecting change.

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ORCID for Philip Higham: orcid.org/0000-0001-6087-7224

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