Abstract
The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.
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This research was partly supported by Public Health Service Grant MH15792 to the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. Experiment 2 was reported at the 1990 meeting of the Mid tern Psychological Association.
—Accepted by previous editor, Margaret Jean Intans-Peterson
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Belli, R.F., Lindsay, D.S., Gales, M.S. et al. Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals. Mem Cogn 22, 40–54 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202760
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202760