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.
