Psychology Assignment 3

Current Issues and Advances in Misinformation Research

Steven J. Frenda, Rebecca M. Nichols, and Elizabeth F. Loftus University of California, Irvine

Abstract Eyewitnesses are often called upon to report information about what they have seen. A wealth of research from the past century has demonstrated, however, that eyewitness memory is malleable and vulnerable to distorting influences, including the effects of misinformation. In this article, we review recent developments in research related to the misinformation effect, including individual differences in susceptibility, neuroimaging approaches, and protective interview procedures that may better elicit accurate event details. We conclude with a section on related false memory research.

Keywords eyewitness, memory, law, misinformation

Twenty-five people died when a Metrolink commuter train

collided with a Union Pacific freight train near Los Angeles

in September of 2008 (Steinhauer, 2008). With millions of

dollars in lawsuit payouts at stake, federal accident authorities

began an investigation of the deadly crash and had to decide a

key issue: Did the conductor pass legally through a green light,

as four eyewitnesses maintained? Or did he sail through a red

light, distracted by sending and receiving text messages? The

conductor died in the crash, so he could not be asked. If he were

at fault, the railroad company that was responsible for hiring

and supervising him would be liable. If the signal malfunc-

tioned, another company would be on the hook. After an exten-

sive investigation, the authorities decided the eyewitnesses

were wrong. The signal was red, and the engineer’s text messa-

ging was a major contributor to the accident. Is it possible that

four eyewitnesses—including a conductor, a security guard,

and two railroad enthusiasts—were all mistaken about such a

crucial detail? The answer is yes. Eyewitnesses make mistakes,

multiple eyewitnesses can all be wrong, and their erroneous

testimony can have enormous consequences.

How is it possible that so many witnesses could all be so

wrong? Eyewitnesses are called upon not only to remember

details of events but also to describe what people look like and

to decide how confident they are in the accuracy of their mem-

ories. They are often asked to remember things they saw in

extremely stressful circumstances, sometimes months or even

years after the fact. They are frequently bombarded with infor-

mation following the event they witnessed, such as other wit-

nesses’ reports, investigator feedback, leading questions, and

pressures to be both accurate and helpful. In the face of these

challenges, eyewitnesses misremember. In a recent discussion

of the distorting effect witnesses have on the memory of other

witnesses, Wright, Memon, Skagerberg, and Gabbert (2009)

proposed three accounts of why eyewitnesses come to report

incorrect information. First, a witness’s report may be altered

due to normative social influence. That is, a witness may decide

that the cost of disagreeing with law enforcement—or with

other witnesses—is too high, and so he adjusts his report

accordingly. A second possibility is that through informational

social influence processes, a witness comes to endorse a ver-

sion of events that is different from what he remembers because

he believes it to be truer or more accurate than his own mem-

ory. Finally, a witness’s memory can become distorted, some-

times as the result of being exposed to incorrect or misleading

information. This third possibility, known as the misinforma-

tion effect, is the focus of the current review. Advances in mis-

information research concerning individual differences,

neurophysiological correlates, cognitive interviewing, and

related research paradigms are reviewed.

What Is the Misinformation Effect?

In the wake of more than 30 years of research, an ever-growing

literature continues to demonstrate the distorting effects of mis-

leading postevent information on memory for words, faces, and

Corresponding Author:

Elizabeth Loftus, Department of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of

California, Irvine, CA 92697

E-mail: [email protected]

Current Directions in Psychological Science 20(1) 20-23 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963721410396620 http://cdps.sagepub.com

details of witnessed events (see Loftus, 2005, for a review of

the misinformation effect). In a typical misinformation experi-

ment, research subjects are shown materials (e.g., photographs)

and are then exposed to deliberately misleading information

about what they saw. In a final testing phase, many subjects

will inadvertently incorporate elements from the misleading

information into their memory for the original source material.

For example, Stark, Okado, and Loftus (2010) showed subjects

a series of photographs that depicted a man stealing a woman’s

wallet and hiding it in his jacket pocket. Later, subjects heard

recorded narratives describing the slides. Embedded in the nar-

ratives were several pieces of misleading information (e.g.,

‘‘Then the man hid the wallet in his pants pocket’’). Finally,

subjects were asked questions about details from the photo-

graphs, such as ‘‘Where did the thief hide the woman’s wal-

let?’’ A substantial number of those subjects not only

reported that the thief hid the wallet in his pants pocket but they

also reported that they remembered that information from the

photographs, not the narratives.

Who Is Vulnerable?

Nobody is immune to the distorting effects of misinformation.

Building on the adult literature, misinformation effects have

been obtained in myriad subject samples, including infants

(Rovee-Collier, Borza, Adler, & Boller, 1993), and even ani-

mals (e.g., Schwartz, Meissner, Hoffman, Evans, & Frazier,

2004). Nonetheless, there is evidence that certain types of peo-

ple are especially vulnerable to misinformation effects. For

instance, very young children and the elderly are more suscep-

tible to misinformation than adolescents and adults (see Davis

& Loftus, 2005). Also especially vulnerable are subjects who

report lapses in memory and attention (Wright & Livingston-

Raper, 2002). What do these findings tell us about the underly-

ing mechanisms driving the misinformation effect? One argu-

ment is that a poverty of cognitive resources necessitates an

increased reliance on external cues to reconstruct memories

of events. As Loftus (2005) points out, misinformation effects

are easier to obtain when subjects’ attentional resources are

limited. Similarly, people who perceive themselves to be for-

getful and who experience memory lapses may be less able

(or willing) to depend on their own memories as the sole source

of information as they mentally reconstruct an event.

Recently, two major studies containing more than 400 sub-

jects have explored cognitive ability and personality factors as

predictors of susceptibility to misinformation. In each study,

subjects viewed slides of two crimes and later read narratives

of the crimes that contained misinformation. Those subjects

who had higher intelligence scores, greater perceptual abilities,

greater working memory capacities, and greater performance

on face recognition tasks tended to resist misinformation and

produce fewer false memories (Zhu et al., 2010a). Certain

personality characteristics were also shown to be associated

with false memory formation, particularly in individuals with

lesser cognitive ability. Specifically, individuals low in fear

of negative evaluation and harm avoidance, and those high in

cooperativeness, reward dependence, and self-directedness

were associated with an increased vulnerability to misinforma-

tion effects (Zhu et al., 2010b). In other words, it seems that

personality variables may be helpful in understanding the pro-

cesses underlying memory distortion following exposure to

misinformation but less so in individuals with superior cogni-

tive ability. These interactions may help explain why individ-

ual difference results have not always replicated in false

memory research.

Misinformation and Neuroimaging

Relatively new but increasingly popular tools for exploring the

effects of postevent information on memory include a set of

highly specialized neuroscientific methods which include func-

tional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In a typical

fMRI-based behavioral experiment, subjects undergo tradi-

tional experimental procedures in an MRI scanner, during

which functional images of oxygenated blood flow in the brain

are collected. The resulting images can be analyzed and inter-

preted as differential brain activation associated with particular

tasks. Functional MRI, therefore, is a useful and noninvasive

tool for examining the neurobiological correlates of behavior.

Scientists have begun to investigate brain activity associated

with the misinformation effect. In a recent study (Stark et al.,

2010), subjects were shown a series of photographs and later

listened to an auditory narrative describing them, which

included misleading information. Soon afterward, they were

placed into an MRI scanner and given a test of their memory

for the photographs. Functional neuroimaging data revealed

similar patterns of brain activity for true and false memories,

but the true memories (formed by visual information) showed

somewhat more activation in the visual cortex while the false

memories (derived from the auditory narrative) showed some-

what more activation in the auditory cortex. As the researchers

noted, these results are congruent with the sensory reactivation

hypothesis (Slotnick & Schacter, 2004, 2006), which in part

proposes that the same sensory regions activated in the brain

during encoding will be reactivated during retrieval. These

results suggest that there may be differing brain activation pat-

terns for true and false memories when they are encoded in dif-

ferent sensory modalities.

Research that involves neuroimaging and other neuroscien-

tific measurement techniques are promising for discoveries

about the effects of misinformation on memory: They can pro-

vide glimpses into how different neurological processes under-

lie true and false memories. At the present time, however, it

would be wise to err on the side of caution in the application

of these findings. Although some differences were found, the

patterns of brain activation associated with true and false mem-

ories in Stark et al.’s (2010) study were not reliably distinct,

and other small differences in brain activation (unrelated to the

sensory reactivation hypothesis) were not fully accounted for.

Furthermore, data from fMRI studies are often averaged both

within and across participants, which makes interpretation at

the individual level of analysis difficult. Although functional

Misinformation Research 21

neuroimaging is elaborate and cutting edge, it has yet to pro-

vide a sure-fire way to confidently judge whether or not a par-

ticular person’s memory is accurate.

Protecting Against Misinformation Effects

Not surprisingly, some effort has been focused on ways to pro-

tect against the distorting effect of misinformation. One tech-

nique for improving the accuracy and completeness of an

eyewitness’s recollection is known as the cognitive interview,

a set of rules and guidelines for interviewing eyewitnesses (see

Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006, for a review). The CI recom-

mends, for example, the use of free recall, contextual cues, tem-

poral ordering of events, and recalling the event from a variety

of perspectives (such as from a perpetrator’s point of view).

Also, the CI recommends that investigators avoid suggestive

questioning, develop rapport with the witness, and discourage

witnesses from guessing. In one recent study, subjects viewed

an 8-minute film depicting a robbery (Memon, Zaragoza,

Clifford, & Kidd, 2009). Later, subjects were given either a

CI or a free-response control interview, followed by suggestive

questioning about events not depicted in the film. Results indi-

cated that, consistent with earlier findings, the CI produced

more correct details than did the free-response procedure.

One week after the interview procedure, subjects were given

a recognition test for items in the video, and subjects incorpo-

rated details from the suggestive questioning into their memory

for the event. Results showed that the CI deterred the effects of

suggestion, but only when it came before the suggestive inter-

view. Though the investigative process would ideally be free of

all suggestive influence, a properly implemented cognitive

interview may help protect the integrity of an eyewitness’s

memory.

Related Lines of Research

In addition to the classic misinformation paradigm, researchers

have developed other ways to demonstrate that even the

subtlest suggestions can produce astonishing false witness

reports. For instance, a handful of studies have emerged in

which subjects are simply asked if they have seen video footage

of well-known news events, when in fact no such video footage

exists. One study found that 40% of a British sample was will-

ing to report having seen nonexistent footage of a bus explod-

ing in the 2005 London terrorist attacks (Ost, Granhag, Udell,

& Hjelmsäter, 2008). Of the subjects who claimed they saw the

footage, 35% described memories of details that they could not

have seen. Another study (Sjödén, Granhag, Ost, & Hjelmsäter,

2009) found that 64% of a Swedish sample claimed to have

seen nonexistent video footage of an attack on the Swedish for-

eign minister, and 19% went on to describe details in the form

of written narratives. The ease with which these studies elicited

blatantly false memory reports is striking.

Research has also shown that suggestion can also shape

autobiographical memory. Beginning with Loftus and

Pickrell’s Lost in the Mall study (1995), a series of studies have

successfully used personalized suggestion (or other suggestive

techniques) to plant false memories of traumatic childhood

events (Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999), receiving a painful

enema (Hart & Schooler, 2006), and even impossible events

such as meeting Bugs Bunny—a Warner Brothers charac-

ter—at Disneyland (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002). These lines

of research represent a broad area in their own right, with con-

troversies and applications that are beyond the scope of this

paper. However, they show that misleading postevent informa-

tion has implications beyond merely mistaking a green traffic

light for a red one or misremembering where a pickpocket hid

a woman’s wallet. If suggestion can cause us to remember

experiences that never occurred, what does this say about the

reliability of eyewitness evidence in general? If merely asking

people if they have seen events they could not possibly have

witnessed represents a strong enough suggestion to cause such

staggering errors, what are the implications for witnesses who

were present at a crime scene but never saw a perpetrator’s

face, only to hear it described later? Researchers continue to

investigate what conditions lead to memory distortion, which

types of people are most susceptible, and how best to prevent

the distorting effects of postevent information. Unfortunately,

in spite of recent scientific advances, many eyewitness errors

continue to go undetected and can have devastating

consequences.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect

to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Recommended Reading

Brainerd, C.J., & Reyna, V.F. (2005). The science of false memory.

New York: Oxford University Press. A book, over 500 pages long,

that describes nearly everything a reader would want to know

about false memories.

Loftus, E.F. (2005). (See References). Summarizes some of the key

studies that have contributed to more than three decades’ worth

of research on the misinformation effect.

References

Braun, K.A., Ellis, R., & Loftus, E.F. (2002). Make my memory: How

advertising can change our memories of the past. Psychology &

Marketing, 19, 1–23.

Davis, D., & Loftus, E.F. (2005). Age and functioning in the legal sys-

tem: Perception memory and judgment in victims, witnesses and

jurors. In I. Noy & W. Karwowski (Eds.), Handbook of forensic

human factors and ergonomics. London, England: Taylor &

Francis.

Hart, R.E., & Schooler, J.W. (2006). Increasing belief in the

experience of an invasive procedure that never happened: The role

of plausibility and schematicity. Applied Cognitive Psychology,

20, 661–669.

Loftus, E.F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind:

A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning

and Memory, 12, 361–366.

22 Frenda et al.

Loftus, E.F., & Pickrell, J.E. (1995). The formation of false memories.

Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720–725.

Memon, A., Zaragoza, M., Clifford, B.R., & Kidd, L. (2009). Inocula-

tion or antidote? The effects of cognitive interview timing on false

memory for forcibly fabricated events. Law and Human Behavior,

34, 105–117.

Ost, J., Granhag, P., Udell, J., & Hjelmsäter, E.R. (2008). Familiarity

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When eyewitnesses talk. Current Directions in Psychological Sci-

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Misinformation Research 23

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