High Confidence Eyewitness Memory Errors in Older Adults

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。自信但错误的目击者证词是错误定罪的主要原因之一。研究者最近发表的研究表明，老年人特别容易在各种任务中犯高自信记忆错误，包括目击者记忆测试。这个项目通过两个系列的研究来调查这种与年龄相关的高可信度错误的增加。第一个系列关注的是易受暗示的错误，也就是说，人们声称他们实际上遇到的事件只是被暗示给他们的。这些研究检验了：1)在一个更生态有效的范式中，年龄相关的暗示错误增加的普遍性；2)当建议信息的来源不可信时，老年人是否能够抵制高可信度建议性错误；3)编码时的注意力分散是否有助于高可信度地犯错。第二个系列的研究侧重于对面孔的记忆，通过阵容识别测试进行评估。本系列研究考察：1)老年人容易做出高置信度的错误阵容识别的假设；2)无论老年人对目标面孔的记忆强度如何，高置信度错误的脆弱性是否持续存在（即，这不是老年人记忆力差的结果）。这项研究的必要性尤其重要，因为：(1)老年人在美国人口中所占的比例将越来越大：从2000年的12%增加到2030年的20%；(2)随着社会的老龄化，对目击证人记忆的研究越来越多，但对老年人目击证人记忆的研究相对较少。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (Public Law 111-5).Confident but mistaken eyewitness testimony is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Recent published research by the investigator suggests that older adults are particularly prone to make high confidence memory errors in a variety of tasks, including tests of eyewitness memory. This project investigates this age-related increase in high-confidence errors with two series of studies. The first series focuses on suggestibility errors, that is, instances in which persons assert that they have actually encountered an event that has only been suggested to them. These studies examine: 1) the generality of the age-related increase in suggestibility errors in a more ecologically-valid paradigm; 2) whether older adults can resist making high confidence suggestibility errors when the source of the suggested information has been discredited; and 3) whether distractibility at encoding is a mechanism that contributes to making errors with high confidence. The second series of studies focuses on memory for faces, as assessed with a lineup identification test. This series examines: 1) the hypothesis that older adults are prone to make high confidence false lineup identifications; and 2) whether the vulnerability to making high confidence errors persists regardless of the strength of older adults' memory for the target face (i.e., it is not a consequence of older adults' poor memory). The need for this research is particularly important given that (1) older adults will comprise an increasing proportion of the US population: from 12% of the population in 2000 to an estimated 20% in 2030; and (2) despite the aging of society and the large amount of research on eyewitness memory, relatively little research has investigated the eyewitness memory of older adults.