Abstract
Studies of eyewitness suggestibility have traditionally used a paradigm that maximizes the extent to which the postevent interview overlaps with the witnessed event in terms of narrative content, narrative structure, and environmental context. The present study explored whether these dimensions of overlap contribute to people’s tendency to confuse suggested details for those they have actually witnessed. We systematically manipulated the extent to which the postevent questionnaire overlapped with the witnessed event. Across two experiments, overlap in narrative content, narrative structure, or environmental context was not found to increase suggestibility effects, even though the manipulation did have other memory effects (e.g., it improved cued recall of the actual source of the suggestions, Experiment 2). These findings suggest that understanding the interaction between the structure and content of the objective context in which misinformation is encountered and various remembering contexts (e.g., recognition vs. recall) is important for advancing our understanding of source confusion in an eyewitness situation.
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Experiment 1 was included in the doctoral dissertation submitted by K.J.M. to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of doctoral requirements. Various portions of this project were supported by research awards from the Applied Psychology Center of Kent State University to K.J.M., NSF Grant SES-9819303 to M.S.Z., and NIA Grant AG09253 to Marcia K. Johnson.
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Mitchell, K.J., Zaragoza, M.S. Contextual overlap and eyewitness suggestibility. Memory & Cognition 29, 616–626 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200462
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200462