Misinformation

Question 1

Post Event Information

Answer 1

Any information the witness receives following an event. May influence later recall of the event. Can come from media, police, family, friends, other witnesses. Leading questions and poor wording of questions (Loftus) are post event information.

Question 2

Source Monitoring

Answer 2

Establishing where and when a memory came from. Helps people differentiate between real and false memories.

Question 3

Schema and Memory

Answer 3

If a situation is ambiguous, people use their schema to fill in gaps in knowledge with schema-consistent information. This can lead to misinformation being stored in memory and is an example of a source monitoring error.

Question 4

Susceptibility to Misinformation

Answer 4

Older adults have trouble remembering contextual information and children are likely to accept misinformation as true. A person who pays attention to the event will have less chance of being susceptible to misinformation.

Question 5

False Memory

Answer 5

Three stages
Event must be seen as plausible
Person must believe the event happened
Person creates contextual information to support the belief.

Question 6

False Memory Creation

Answer 6

Photos of the event have the highest rate of creating false memories. Photos that are unrelated to the event but are from a persons past also lead to false memories (context reinstatement). Narratives are less successful, but still lead to false memory creation.

Question 7

Mechanisms of Recovered Memories

Answer 7

An event acts as context reinstatement, individual forgets that they previously remembered it, suggestion (eg hypnotism). Not necessarily repression, more likely to be distraction.