Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A reconciliation of the evidence on eyewitness testimony: Comments on McCloskey and Zaragoza.

1989; American Psychological Association; Volume: 118; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/0096-3445.118.1.86

1939-2222

Barbara Tversky, Michael Tuchin,

Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare

Loftus and her colleagues demonstrated distorted reports of memory for an event in the direction of postevent misleading information. McCloskey and Zaragoza argued that these results do not necessarily imply a weakening of the memory for the original event. They obtained evidence supporting their position by using a modified recognition test. In this experiment we introduced still another modification to the recognition test (Yes'VNo instead of forced choice) to answer McCloskey and Zaragoza's objections to Loftus and her colleagues' procedures. We obtained evidence for distorted reports of original information as a consequence of the misleading information. Memory and confidence data support an interference or inaccessibility interpretation of the memory errors but cannot rule out overwriting of the original information in some cases. In a series of studies that can by now be considered classic, Loftus and her colleagues (e.g., Loftus, 1979; Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978) showed that misleading postevent information impairs memory report of an original event. The fate of the memory for the original event has become a matter of debate; some say that it is overwritten, others say that it is rendered less accessible, and still others say that there is no evidence that anything has happened to it at all. In all of the experiments, subjects first viewed a sequence