Week 3 reading- Current Issues and Advances in Misinformation Research

Question 1

What do Wright, Memon, Skagerberg and Gabbert (2009) propose as the 3 accounts of why eyewitness’s come to report incorrect information?

Answer 1

• Eye witness report may be altered due to normative social influence (readjust report according to what other witness and police say as don’t want to deal with the repercussions of having a differing memory)
• Witness endorses an event/ version different to what they remember because they genuinely believe it to be more accurate (i.e. they don’t hold much faith in their own memory)
• Witness memory becomes distorted as a result of being exposed to misleading or incorrect information (the misinformation effect)

Question 2

Why can poverty of cognitive resources lead to the misinformation effect?

Answer 2

Poverty of cognitive resources (e.g. lack of ability to pay attention) drives increased need to rely on external cues to reconstruct memories

Question 3

What did Zhu et al. 2010 find about the traits of individuals that results in them being less susceptible to misinformation?

Answer 3

Subjects with 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

Question 4

What are some personality traits that are associated with being more susceptible to misinformation?

Answer 4

Individuals low in fear of negative evaluation, harm avoidance, high in cooperativeness, reward dependence and self-directedness were associated with increased vulnerability to misinformation effects

Question 5

What has fMRI revealed about the neurobiological correlates of the misinformation effect?

Answer 5

-True memories tended to activate the visual cortex more while false memories showed more activation in the auditory cortex
-Results are congruent with the sensory reactivation hypothesis, which proposes that the same sensory regions activated during encoding will be reactivated in retrieval
-Overall this suggests that there could be differing brain activation patterns for true and false memories when they are encoded in different sensory modalities
-Caution needed when drawing conclusions from this study as only subtle differences in brain activation shown, more research is needed

Question 6

What is cognitive interview?

Answer 6

Cognitive interview is used as a technique to improve the Accuracy + Completeness of eyewitness testimony (essentially it’s a aet of rules + guidelines for interviewing witnesses)

Question 7

What does the cognitive interview encourage and discourage when interviewing witnesses?

Answer 7

Recommends free recall of events, contextual cues, temporal ordering of events, building rapport and recalling events from a variety of perspectives such as from that of the perpetrator, good to discourages witness from guessing, avoid suggestive questions.

Question 8

Did CI (cognitive interviews) deter effects of suggestion/ misinformation?

Answer 8

CI deterred the effects of suggestion but only when it came before the suggestive interview