Beazley, Joanna

The purpose of this study is to determine which
United States license plate(s) are best designed for
recall. Based on what we know of human memory
in terms of numbers, letters, and their combinations,
this study aims to identify the “ideal” license plate
for citizens to remember. This study’s results will be
applicable in criminal cases, as well as in identifying
vehicles involved in AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
There are many studies that have examined eyewitness
memory for crimes in younger adults and older
adults. In this study, we will examine the effects of
age on memory for license plates. We want to determine
which license plates are better remembered by
younger and older adults. We hypothesize that the
organization of letters and numbers on the license plate will have a larger effect on older adults than
on younger adults because older adults need more
memory support.

In order to remember an event, one must remember
the participants in the event, the actions that are
performed, and which people performed which actions.
Often people make binding errors in memory in
which they remember the people and the actions, but
they incorrectly remember one person as the person
who performed an action that was actually performed
by someone else. Half of the participants in our study
saw a series of actions with each action performed by
one of two actors. The other half of the participants
saw each action performed by a different actor. We
found that older adults were more likely to make binding
errors than were younger adults. Younger adults
were equally likely to make binding errors in the two
conditions. Older adults, however, made many fewer
binding errors when they saw only two actors during
encoding than when they saw many actors during encoding.