EYEWITNESS MEMORY AND MISINFORMATION: ARE REMEMBER/KNOW JUDGMENTS MORE RELIABLE THAN SUBJECTIVE CONFIDENCE?

We investigated the phenomenological experience of eyewitness identifi cation following misinformation by assessing memory for specific item information (product brands). Participants selected various brands of products to put in a fictitious "care package" to be sent to soldiers deployed overseas. After this encoding episode, participants were presented post-event information. In this post-event narrative, information seen at encoding was either correctly referenced, contradicted, or additively suggested. Six-AFC recognition tasks were completed either 10 minutes or 1 week later. In addition, we examined the relationship between RK judgments and subjective confidence by assessing RK judgments independently of (Experiment 1) and along with (Experiment 2) confidence ratings for the same response. Over time, accuracy decreased by half, false alarms for misinformation doubled, and "remember" judgments for additive misinformation tripled. RK judgments and confidence were positively correlated across all conditions, and did not provide unique discriminating information. Implications for eyewitness identifi cation in civil as well as criminal testimony are discussed.