THE ROLE OF COMMITMENT IN PRODUCING MISINFORMATION EFFECTS IN EYEWITNESS MEMORY

We conducted three experiments exploring conditions in which misleadin g postevent information interferes with people's ability to remember d etails about an event they witnessed. The key condition included in ea ch experiment was the misled-plus-commit condition. After viewing slid es depicting a crime, subjects in this condition read a narrative that contained misinformation. Following the narrative, they completed an interpolated recognition test that induced them to select the misinfor mation. Assessment of memory for the slides using a final, modified re cognition test indicated that performance in the misled-plus-commit co ndition was most frequently near chance, whereas performance in the co ntrol condition was far above chance. This result was obtained on four separate occasions and indicates that prior retrieval of misinformati on impairs memory. Another important finding was that the deleterious effect of passively reading about misinformation in a narrative is not as great as the effect of reading about it and then selecting it on a n interpolated test. Actively retrieving misinformation seems to cause particularly deleterious effects. Our conclusion is that the findings are compatible with the retrieval blocking hypothesis, which assumes that repeated retrieval of misinformation blocks access to the witness ed information.