The effect of postevent information on adults' eyewitness reports

The present experiment examined the conditions under which adults' reports of an event are influenced by information encountered after the event occur red. Adults were exposed to neutral, leading, and misleading postevent info rmation about a target event 24 hours after that event. Twenty-four hours a fter exposure to postevent information, participants were first asked a gen eral, open-ended question (free recall test procedure) and were then asked a series of specific questions. Some participants were asked to select thei r response from two possible alternatives (recognition test procedure) and some participants were required to generate their own answers to the same q uestions (directed recall test procedure). The nature of the original infor mation, the nature of the postevent information, and the specificity of the questioning procedure influenced the number of correct responses and the n umber of misleading errors that participants made. These findings have impo rtant implications for interviewing adult witnesses. Copyright (C) 2001 Joh n Wiley & Sons, Ltd.