Eyewitness identification

The current study sought to examine further the concept of
eyewitness memory for events. Specifically, using filmed events that were
performed with objects and events performed without objects, we explored
the potential interaction of the object cue and binding or conjunction
errors. This specific memory error involves improperly pairing two or more
feature memories together in the long-term store. In our study, these
features were the action and the actress performing the action. Our study
involved 51 participants. Participants were shown target events in Week 1
and asked to retrieve the target events from a larger group of events in
Week 2. While findings did not show the expected interaction of
conjunction events to object presence or absence, objects without an
object showed a significantly higher acceptance rate. A secondary analysis revealed an interaction effect between head-focus and
recognition item type, meaning participants did view events without an
object differently from objects with an object.

Subjects in kindergarten, grade 2, and college were shown a videotape of a bicycle theft followed by a one month longitudinal study simulating the witness's experience during the pretrial phase of a criminal prosecutorial workup. Subjects were asked for free recall as well as for responses to nonleading and correct or incorrectly leading questions. Accuracy of free recall was high for all ages. Younger children were more susceptible to suggestive leading questions and adults were found to reject many of the "correctly" leading questions. Differences were found between answers to central and peripheral items and subjects were found to change their answers within the same interview in relation to age of the witness and centrality of the question.

Everyday individuals experience problems in accurately remembering who did what in an event. In order to have an accurate memory for an event of this type, an individual needs to remember the person who performed the action, the action itself, and the pairing of these two pieces of information. If these pieces of information are not bound together correctly, the end result is an inaccurate memory for an event. This study examined the ability of young and older adults to bind people and their actions together in memory. Though both age groups were more likely to falsely recognize novel combinations of familiar actors and actions than they were to falsely recognize novel actions, the older participants were even more likely to falsely recognize these novel combinations. The misbinding of actors and actions may thus contribute to the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification.

Mistakes in combining components of stimuli are called binding or memory conjunction errors. They occur when people mistakenly associate two previously seen stimulus features that were not previously seen together. It is hypothesized that bizarre items will be better remembered than common items. Participants saw 18 continuous events, each containing four actions performed by four different actors. One week later they returned for a recognition test and were shown more video clips. There were old, new action, and conjunction items. A conjunction item was composed of a familiar actor performing a familiar action that had previously been performed by someone else. For each clip, participants were asked if they saw this person perform this action before. Participants responded "yes" to conjunction same context items more often than they did to conjunction different context items.

Event memory studies have shown that older adults typically have poorer memories for events than do younger adults. Unfortunately, these studies tested memory for events that contained only young adults as the actors. It could be that the younger adults remembered the events better due to an own-age bias. One particular type of event memory error is called unconscious transference. In unconscious transference, a binding error results in false conjunction memories. Several studies have shown that older adults are more likely to make these errors. This study aims to look more closely at the effects of own-age bias on face recognition and conjunction errors made in memory for events. Younger adults were tested on their memory for both younger and older adults seen performing simple actions in video clips as well as in "mug shot" photograph tests.

Two separate groups of young and middle-aged adults watched videos of events being performed by a number of different college-aged females. Both the young goup of adults and the middle-aged group of adults were later tested on their memory for both the individual features of these events (i.e., actors and actions), and for conjunctions of features (i.e., which actor performed which action) in order to determine how likely they were to remember which actors performed which actions. Our results showed that frontal lobe functioning is not affected with age. However, there is a slight decrease in medial temporal functioning that continues on throughout life. There was a main effect of Question, Item Type, and Age Group explained through a three-way ANOVA. Binding errors increase with age because specific areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, deteriorate with age.