226 • CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors
What is most interesting about this participant’s response is that he didn’t remember the
wedding the fi rst time, but did remember it the second time. Apparently, hearing about the
event and then waiting caused the event to emerge as a false memory. This can be explained
by familiarity. When questioned about the wedding the second time, the participant’s famil-
iarity with the wedding from the fi rst exposure caused him to accept the wedding as having
actually happened. This is like Jacoby’s “becoming famous overnight” experiment, in which
familiarity led participants to erroneously label Sebastian Weissdorf and other nonfamous
people as being famous. Both of these cases illustrate source monitoring errors because the
participants attributed the source of their familiarity to something that never happened.
Recently, Stephen Lindsay and coworkers (2004) did an experiment that used the
procedure described above, but with one additional twist. Participants were presented
with descriptions of real childhood experiences supplied by their parents and another
experience that never occurred (placing a toy called Slime, a brightly colored gelatinous
compound, in their fi rst-grade teacher’s desk). Additionally, Lindsay had one group of
participants look at a photograph of their fi rst- or second-grade class, like the one in
● Figure 8.18, as they were being presented with the story about placing the slime toy in
the teacher’s desk. The result of this experiment was that the group of participants who
saw the picture experienced more than twice as many false memories as the group who did
not see the picture. There are a number of reasons this might have occurred, but the impor-
tant point for our purposes is that adding the picture enhanced the false memory effect.
We will return to this result in the Something to Consider section at the end of the chapter.Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony?
We have seen, from the results of numerous laboratory studies, that memory is fallible.
But nowhere is this fallibility more evident and signifi cant than in the area of eyewitness
testimony—testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about what he or she saw during
commission of the crime. Eyewitness testimony is one of the most convincing types of
evidence to a jury, but unfortunately many innocent people have been incarcerated based
on mistaken identifi cation by eyewitnesses. These mistaken identifi cations occur for a
number of reasons. Some errors are caused by diffi culties in perceiving a person’s face and●FIGURE 8.18 Photographs of a fi rst- or second-grade class, similar to the one shown
here (which shows slightly older children), were shown to participants in Lindsay et al.’s
(2004) experiment.Courtesy Anne Draus/Scratchgravel Publishing ServicesCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.