EYEWITNESS MEMORY and INTERFERENCE Importance of retrieval conditions –Note Encoding Specificity effects The Misinformation Effect –Loftus, Miller & Burns 78: stop sign or yield sign? –Blocking or unlearning? Little interference when RI distractor isn’t activated (Chandler, 93) –Novel foils (stop / turn?) –Cued recall (sign: S___) –But is this realistic? Less interference when cue is more specific/discriminative So: mostly blocking, challenge is to avoid it in interviews

MISATTRIBUTION AND THE FALSE MEMORY EFFECT Intrusions in episodic memory –Potential sources: Other lists, associates, etc. studied –Classic interference effects Semantic knowledge –“famous overnight” effect (Jacoby) –Schematic errors in recall (Bartlett) Items generated at encoding –Implicit associative responses (Underwood, 65) –Reality monitoring failures (Johnson) Items presented or generated during post-event interviews or tests –Misleading or contradictory details –Repeated tests of distractors –Can be reduced by Encouraging source memory at encoding or retrieval Making contexts more distinctive

–Door –Glass –House –Ledge –Breeze –Shade –Open –Curtain –Frame –Pane –View –Sill –Sash –Screen –Shutter

The False Memory Paradigm –Deese (59) / Roediger & McDermott (95) –Study lists of associates to a target “lure” –High rate of intrusions in recall, false alarms in recognition –Confidence may be high, “remember” responses significant for FR –Processes of FR Reduced but still present with categorized pictures (Koutsaal & Schacter 97) Reduced when pictures accompany words (Israel & Schacter 97) Extent shows balance between semantic generalization and episodic differentiation (Schacter & Dodson 02) Increasing FR with repetition in amnesia, decreasing in normals. Why?

FALSE MEMORY AND THE BRAIN If we can’t distinguish them, can our brains? –Absence of differences in ERPs for Hits and False Alarms (some exceptions) –PET and fMRI studies show mostly similar activity for TR and FR –But in some cases, FR shows: smaller parietal-occipital P800 (Gonsalves & Paller 00) No lateralized ERP bias at test (P500; Fabiani et al., 00) No posterior medial temporal lobe (parahipp) increase in fMRI for lures, increase for targets (Cabeza et al, 02) –Will this all be task-specific?