Question

Psychological research shows that people often 'remember' things that never happened. Given this information, describe practices or policies for police interrogations, eyewitness testimony or psychotherapy that would prevent the creation of false memories.

Answer 1

Eyewitnesses believe that their recall is complete and perfect, but in truth, memories are, at best, sensory and emotional impressions blurred by imagination, belief, ambiguity, and time. As convincing as juries may find the testimony of witnesses, good prosecutors know that human memory is, more often than not, the least reliable source of evidence.

If you are at the same place where a criminal is and you see them run off with a lady’s purse, do you think you would be able to tell a police officer what the thief looked like? Reporting what you saw to the police is called an eyewitness account. An eyewitness account is telling someone, like a police officer, exactly what you saw during a crime or other event. This report would include information such as what the thief looked like and what you saw him or her do. Although accurately telling the officers what happened may seem easy, your eyewitness account can have mistakes. For example, in eyewitness accounts, people sometimes report that a criminal is taller than they actually are in real life. Such error is a problem because police work can rely on eyewitness accounts to help solve some crimes.

There are many other sources of memory error. For example, someone’s skin color also provides a clue to whether his or her face will be memorable. This is called the other-race effect. People are often better at recognizing faces that match their own race. For example, an African–American would be best at remembering the face of another African–American., and it means that eyewitnesses are better at identifying criminals if the eyewitness is the same race¹ as the criminal. Another is, a Caucasian person is better at recognizing Caucasian faces, and an African–American person is better at recognizing African–American faces. This means that police officers should be extra cautious in believing other-race eyewitnesses.

In the misinformation paradigm, false memories are caused by external misleading information and we term them exogenous false memories. These false memories have been found in all age groups, from infants to older people in more than 40 years of investigation (Frenda, Nichols, & Loftus, 2011; Loftus, 2005). The misinformation paradigm focuses on false memories for details of an event. Yet, rich false memories of a wholly novel event can also be created using suggestive pressure. For instance, in the false memory implantation paradigm, participants are presented with fake evidence depicting a false event (e.g., a photoshopped old family picture) and then they are interviewed to elaborate on the false event. Otgaar, Candel, Merckelbach, and Wade (2009) presented children with a fake newspaper article about people being abducted by a UFO in their hometown when they were aged 4. The child participant was then told that his or her mother had confirmed that he or she had been abducted by the UFO as well. Later, the participant was interviewed twice during a period of seven days and asked to recall the UFO abduction. The majority of the children, namely, over 70% vividly and falsely recalled that they had been abducted by aliens. One child, for example, remembered seeing flashes, blue/green puppets and other abducted children in the UFO.

Preventing False Memory and Promoting Accurate Memory The story so far is that false memories can be easily generated. However, researchers have also devised several ways to prevent the occurrence of false memories and promote the retrieval of accurate memories. A general principle is to avoid giving suggestive information to witnesses during investigative interviews. One important step here is the construction of empirically validated interview protocols that maximize accurate reporting and minimize false reports. One well-studied interview protocol is the Cognitive Interview (CI). The CI is a well-studied interviewing protocol that has been employed for interviewing witnesses and studied for more than 30 years. The CI consists of several cognitive principles that may enhance accurate statements. During the CI, eyewitnesses undergo the following procedure (for details see Fisher & Schreiber, 2007). First, the interview starts in a friendly manner to build rapport with the witness, which will lower the stress that a witness may experience when he or she encounters a police investigator. Research has demonstrated that rapport-building during CI decreases a witness’ susceptibility to misinformation for a mock-crime (Vallano & Compo, 2011). Thereafter, the witness is encouraged to report everything recalled, without being interrupted by the interviewer. Accordingly, the witness controls the flow of information instead of being led by the interviewer. Following this free-narrative phase, the interviewer probes the witness about the target event with open-ended questions, which as noted above, results in fewer false memories than closed questions. Memon, Meissner, and Fraser (2010) reviewed 25 years’ laboratory and field studies on the CI, and found that it has resulted in a large and significant increase in correct details with only a small increase in errors in comparison to standard interviewing conditions. Second, post-warnings have been found to be effective in reducing false memories that are caused by misinformation. Post-warnings are warnings given to participants that some of the post-event information they received might be inaccurate. For instance, participants who had received misinformation from their co-witnesses were warned later that their co-witnesses might have watched a different video, thus making the participants to reflect on their own memories (Paterson, Kemp, & Mclntyre, 2012). Blank and Launay (2014) conducted a meta-analysis of 25 studies from the 1980s to 2010s on the effect of post-warnings. They found that post-warnings can reduce the original memory misinformation effect to 43% of its original (no-warning) size. Third, using a blind lineup administration can prevent witnesses’ memories from distortion during lineup identification. In a blind lineup administration, the administrator of the lineup is unaware of the identity of the suspect. A blind lineup can prevent the administrator from giving a witness subtle hints such as an unconscious gesture. Thus, in a blind procedure, it is unlikely that the administrator will intentionally or unintentionally lead the witness to identify a person on the basis of misinformation than during a non-blind lineup. Blind lineup administration can also reduce the postidentification effect such that witnesses’ confidence and judgments about their identifications do not escalate due to erroneous feedback (Dysart, Lawson, & Rainey, 2012). Distinguishing between True versus False memories False memories have been reported to contain fewer sensory details than true memories (e.g., Norman & Schacter, 1997), but there are also many cases where false memories are experienced as vividly like true memories (Foley, Bays, Foy, & Woodfield, 2015). With the development of brain scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is possible to identify false from true memories by studying the neural differences between the two. Furthermore, neural correlates of true and false memories have been studied extensively in recent years. Slotnick and Schacter (2004; 2006) identified different activations in the sensoryprocessing brain areas for true and false memories. Similar to the DRM paradigm, participants in their studies viewed various shapes in the study phase, and then formed false memories for related but not presented shapes in the test phase. fMRI scanning of the test phase revealed that there was greater activation in the early visual processing regions for true memories (Brodmann area 17, 18) than false memories. Fisher, and Loftus (2010) used the misinformation paradigm in which they presented participants with picture stimuli in the study phase and misinformation one day later. They also found that true memories of visual stimuli were preferentially associated with early visual processing areas, which are normally involved in sensory encoding of visual stimuli (see also Atkins & Reuter-Lorenz, 2011). Other studies have shown that true memories for auditory stimuli were associated with activation in the auditory sensory processing regions such as the left temporo-parietal cortex (Cabeza et al., 2001; Abe, Okuda, Suzuki, et al, 2008). On the basis of this type of results, Schacter, Chamberlain, Gaesser, and Gerlach (2012) proposed the sensory reactivation hypothesis, which holds that true memories are accompanied by the retrieval of more sensory/perceptual details than false memories. This pattern is manifested in the reactivation of sensory/perceptual encoding brain regions that were engaged during the establishment of true but not false memories. Thus, when people have truly seen or heard target stimuli, brain areas that were engaged in processing the stimuli (e.g., early visual cortex) will be activated as soon as they attempt to retrieve memories of the targets. False memories lack such kind of activations as they have not been “seen” or “heard” before. The sensory reactivation hypothesis has been supported by recent studies (Dennis, Bowman, & Vandekar, 2012; Dennis, Johnson, & Peterson, 2014).