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(ARRA)(公法111-5)资助的。可疑但错误的目击者证词是导致错误定罪的主要原因之一。该研究人员最近发表的研究表明，老年人尤其容易在各种任务中犯下高度自信的记忆错误，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置信度错误的增加。第一个系列集中于暗示性错误，即人们声称他们实际上遇到了一个只对他们提出建议的事件。这些研究考察了：1)在更具生态有效性的范式中，年龄相关的暗示错误增加的普遍性；2)当建议信息的来源被怀疑时，老年人是否能够抵制犯高自信暗示错误；以及3)编码时的分心是否是导致高自信错误的一种机制。第二个系列的研究重点是面孔的记忆，通过阵容识别测试进行评估。这一系列研究考察：1)假设老年人容易做出高置信度的错误阵容识别；2)无论老年人对目标面孔的记忆有多强，犯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)。鉴于(1)老年人在美国人口中的比例将越来越大：从2000年的12%增加到2030年的估计20%，这项研究的必要性尤其重要；(2)尽管社会老龄化和关于目击者记忆的大量研究，但相对较少的研究调查了老年人的目击者记忆。

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.