Psychology and Aging 2015. Vol. 30, No. 1, 46 -6 1

© 2014 American Psychological Association 0882-7974/15/$ 12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038492

Aging, Confidence, and Misinformation: Recalling Information With the Cognitive Interview Chad S. Dodson, Emma Powers, and Mariko Lytell University of Virginia In 2 experiments, younger and older adults witnessed a simulated robbery, received misleading infor­ mation about the event, and then were interviewed with the Cognitive Interview about their memory for the robbery. In both experiments, older adults were disproportionately more confident than younger adults in the accuracy of incorrect information that they recalled than in the accuracy of correct information. Critically, this age-related increase in high-confidence errors occurred even in comparison with younger adults who were matched with older adults on the overall amount and accuracy of the information remembered about the robbery. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that retrieval warnings to disregard the misinformation were just as effective in older adults as compared with younger adults at reducing the reporting of misleading information. Finally, both experiments showed that across the multiple retrieval stages of the Cognitive Interview, the final retrieval stage is roughly half as effective for older adults relative to younger adults at eliciting previously unreported information. These results indicate that investigators have much less to gain from older adults than they do from younger adults with repeated inquiries (during the same session) about a witnessed event. Keywords: confidence, misinformation, Cognitive Interview, older adults, memory

Older adults are prone to making high-confidence errors in eyewitness memory and other memory tasks (Dodson, Bawa, & Krueger, 2007; Dodson, Bawa, & Slotnick, 2007; Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Fandakova, Shing & Lindenberer, 2013a, 2013b; Shing, Werkle-Bergner, Li, & Lindenberger, 2009; for related findings, see also Jacoby, Bishara, Hessels, & Toth, 2005). This propensity to make high-confidence errors occurs even when older and younger adults are equated on their accuracy at remembering past events. These results are of considerable practical and theo­ retical importance. Practically, in 2005, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that roughly two million older adults were victims of crime (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2006). Because older adults constitute an ever increasing proportion of the U.S. popu­ lation, they will increasingly serve as eyewitnesses and, thus, will potentially contribute to wrongful convictions on the basis of confident, but mistaken, eyewitness testimony. Theoretically, the age-related increase in high-confidence memory errors fits the predictions of a misrecollection account of cognitive aging (Dod­ son, Bawa, & Krueger, 2007). Advancing age is associated with an increased susceptibility to miscombine features of different events. For example, features of an event in which a perpetrator was seen may be combined with the features of another event that was either

witnessed or only thought about. One essential component of this account is that miscombined features are sufficiently bound to­ gether that they produce confidently held phenomenal experiences. It is this latter component that predicts that the elderly are prone to showing false memories even when they are highly confident about the accuracy of their memory. One goal of the present experiments was to examine whether the age-related increase in high-confidence errors generalizes to a more ecologically valid memory test— the Cognitive Interview, which many researchers view as the most effective way of ques­ tioning witnesses (e.g., Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006). As a foundation for the present experiments, the following sections briefly review research on aging memory and on the effectiveness of the Cognitive Interview.

Aging Memory Older adults are plagued by a variety of memory problems (for reviews, see Craik, Anderson, Kerr, & Li, 1995; Light, 1991; Salthouse, 1991). However, not all aspects of memory are affected equally by aging. For example, age effects tend to be more pro­ nounced on tests of free recall than on tests of recognition (e.g., Craik et al., 1995). In addition, a growing literature suggests that older adults have particular difficulty remembering source infor­ mation— specific information that identifies how an event was experienced (e.g., Dodson & Schacter, 2002; Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993; Memon, Bartlett, Rose, & Gray, 2003; Schacter, Norman, & Koutstaal, 1998). Accumulating evidence also shows that older adults are more susceptible than younger adults to false memories— both the “re­ membering” of events that never occurred and the misremembering of events that did occur (for general reviews, see Dodson, Koutstaal, & Schacter, 2000; McCabe, Roediger, McDaniel, &

This article was published Online First December 22, 2014. Chad S. Dodson, Department of Psychology. University of Virginia; Emma Powers, Department of Cognitive Science, University of Virginia; and Mariko Lytell, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia. This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SES 0925145. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Chad S. Dodson, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottes­ ville, VA 22904-4400. E-mail: [email protected]

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AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

Balota, 2009; Schacter, Koutstaal, & Norman, 1997). Overall, there is a consensus that older adults are particularly prone to suffer from source memory failure and show an increased sensi­ tivity to committing false recognition and false recall errors. A frequently used paradigm for studying false memories has been the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm of Loftus and col­ leagues (Loftus, 1979, 1992; Loftus, Miller, & Bums, 1978; for a review, see Davis & Loftus, 2003). In a typical study, participants first witness an event, such as a video of a burglary. In a subse­ quent misinformation stage, participants answer a questionnaire or read a narrative that suggests the presence of objects or actions that did not occur in the original event, such as the presence of a gun. In a final memory test, participants either recall or recognize objects from the original witnessed event or identify the origin of objects (e.g., had it been only seen in the video, only read about in the questionnaire, or both seen and read about?). This procedure reliably induces false memories, whereby individuals claim to remember having seen objects that had only been suggested in a misleading questionnaire or narrative. With respect to aging and false eyewitness memories, many studies have shown that older adults are prone to claim to have witnessed events that were only suggested to them in an earlier misinformation stage and also tend to express higher confidence in these false memories than do younger adults (e.g., Cohen & Faulkner, 1989; Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Karpel, Hoyer, & Toglia, 2001; Loftus, Levidow, & Duensing, 1992; Mitchell, John­ son, & Mather, 2003; Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2004; but, for no age-related differences, see Coxon & Valentine, 1997; Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003; for a review, see Bartlett & Memon, 2006). For example, Cohen and Faulkner, Karpel et al., and Loftus et al. found that older adults falsely recognized more suggestions as having occurred in an original event than did younger adults. Mitchell et al. used a source-monitoring test and also observed that older adults were more likely than younger adults to claim to have seen items that had only been suggested in a questionnaire. In addition, older adults were more confident than younger adults in these suggestibility errors (Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Karpel et al., 2001; Mitchell et al., 2003). Notably, Dodson and Krueger show that these high-confidence errors on the part of older adults persist even in comparison with a group of younger adults who are matched on overall accuracy with older adults (i.e., both groups make comparable amounts of suggestibility errors). Further re­ search, however, is critical to clarify when these high-confidence errors are likely to occur and what can be done to reduce their occurrence.

The Cognitive Interview The Cognitive Interview is increasingly recognized as the most effective way to interview eyewitnesses so as to maximize amounts of correct testimony and minimize incorrect testimony (e.g., Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; for reviews, see Memon, Meiss­ ner, & Fraser, 2010; Wells et al., 2006). This interview technique uses methods that memory research has shown to be effective, such as instructing the interviewee to mentally reinstate the context of the witnessed event when recalling what occurred. Over the years, slightly different variants of the Cognitive Interview have been adopted, but many of them involve the following stages (for review, see Memon et al., 2010): (a) rapport building between the

47

interviewer and the witness; (b) context reinstatement: witness being asked to mentally reconstruct the context of the witnessed event; (c) report everything: witness being instructed to recall everything about the event; (d) change temporal order: witness being instructed to recall the event in a different temporal order, such as from the last event to the first; and (e) focused retrieval: witness being asked to expand on his or her description of recalled details. Many studies have shown that the Cognitive Interview is supe­ rior to a standard interview in increasing recall of correct infor­ mation, but a few studies have also found that the Cognitive Interview is associated with a slight increase in the reporting of incorrect details (for a review, see Kohnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999; Wells et al., 2006). Despite the wealth of studies examining the effectiveness of the Cognitive Interview, relatively few have investigated the influence of this technique on older adults’ recall (e.g., Domburg & McDaniel, 2006; Holliday et al., 2012; McMahon, 2000; Mello & Fisher, 1996; Searcy, Bartlett, Memon, & Swanson, 2001; Wright & Holliday, 2007). Although not all of these studies used an identical version of the Cognitive Interview, they generally observed that this technique increased the amount of correct information recalled by older and younger adults as compared with a comparison interview condition. Indeed, Memon et al. (2010) concluded that older adults benefit more than younger adults from the Cognitive Interview with respect to re­ membering correct details about a past event. Memon et al. sug­ gested that one reason the Cognitive Interview is so effective, especially for older adults, is the retrieval support that is built in to the interview. In contrast with typical recall tasks, the Cognitive Interview’s elements of mentally reinstating the context and fo­ cused retrieval provide a retrieval structure that should be partic­ ularly beneficial for older adults (e.g., Craik, Routh, & Broadbent, 1983). Holliday et al. (2012) used a Modified Cognitive Interview to examine older and younger adults’ memory for a simulated crime and their susceptibility to suggestibility effects. Older adults re­ called fewer correct details overall than did younger adults, which is consistent with the typical age-related memory impairment (for similar findings with a Cognitive Interview, see also Wright & Holliday, 2007). More important, Holliday et al. observed that the usual age-related increase in suggestibility effects disappeared with the modified Cognitive Interview. In contrast, older adults were more likely than younger adults to recall misinformation during a control interview. It is likely, as Holliday et al. argued, that the Cognitive Interview’s instructions to mentally reinstate contextual details from the time of encoding are a primary reason for its beneficial effects on older adults. With respect to confidence ratings, extant studies show no differences between the Cognitive Interview and a comparison interview in the level of confidence ratings that are assigned to recalled events (Allwood, Ask, & Granhag, 2005; Domburg & McDaniel, 2006; Granhag, Jonsson, & Allwood, 2004; McCauley & Fisher, 1995; Mello & Fisher, 1996). Moreover, both Domburg and McDaniel and Mello and Fisher observed that older adults’ degree of confidence about what they recalled was no different between the Cognitive Interview and a comparison interview. In addition, Allwood et al. specifically examined and observed no differences in college students between the Cognitive Interview and a comparison interview in the accuracy of information that

DODSON, POWERS, AND LYTELL

48

was assigned high confidence. So, although the Cognitive Inter­ view improves recall, it does not appear to alter how confidence ratings are assigned to remembered information. In addition to using the Cognitive Interview to examine highconfidence errors made by younger and older adults, the present experiments also examined the effects of distracting younger adults while they witnessed an event. There are two reasons motivating this particular investigation. First, a leading theory of aging attributes older adults’ memory problems to a deficit in gating out and inhibiting distracting events (i.e., the inhibitorydeficit theory of Hasher and Zacks; for a review, see Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). On this view, then, cognitive distraction may be a basis for older adults’ high-confidence errors. However, there is mixed experimental evidence for the notion that distracting younger adults at encoding can duplicate the pattern of memory deficits shown by older adults (e.g., Jennings & Jacoby, 1993), with many studies showing that younger adults under divided attention do not simulate older adults’ deficit (e.g., Craik, Luo, & Sakuta, 2010; Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, Kilb, & Reedy, 2004). For example, Naveh-Benjamin (2000) documented that even when older and younger distracted adults exhibit similar levels of item memory, older adults nevertheless show a deficit at remembering associations between the items (see also Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996). But with respect to confidence in what is remembered, no one—to our knowledge— has examined whether cognitive distrac­ tion at encoding in younger adults can duplicate older adults’ pattern of confidence ratings to correct and incorrect items. For this reason, we examined whether distraction in younger adults would simulate the pattern of confidence ratings shown by older adults, which would suggest that cognitive distraction may be one mechanism that produces high-confidence eyewitness memory errors in older adults. The second motivation for this distraction manipulation was that, on a practical level, eyewitnesses often experience situations that prevent them from devoting full attention to relevant details. Moreover, the Supreme Court has established— in what is known as the Biggers criteria (Neil v. Biggers, 1972)—that an eyewit­ ness’s degree of attention at encoding can be used at trial to evaluate the likely accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Therefore, the present experiments were the first to use the Cognitive Inter­ view to examine the effects of distraction at encoding on what is subsequently remembered by younger adults.

Experiment 1 The design and overall methods of this eyewitness suggestibility experiment were nearly identical to those of Dodson and Krueger (2006). After viewing a video of a mock robbery, participants completed a questionnaire that contained misinformation about what was seen in the video. Finally, every participant’s memory for the video was tested with a Modified Cognitive Interview (MCI). We examined three groups of participants: (a) older adults; (b) younger adults, with a delay between the questionnaire and MCI phases; and (c) younger adults who were distracted while watching the video. We examined a number of predictions. First, when younger and older adults are matched on the overall amount recalled with the MCI, older adults will nevertheless be more susceptible to making high-confidence errors. Matching performance is critically impor­

tant, because it removes differences in the amount recalled as a confounding factor for interpreting age differences in confidence ratings. As we did in past studies, we matched performance by testing a group of younger adults who received an extended time delay between the postevent questionnaire phase and the MCI phase (e.g., Dodson & Krueger, 2006). Although no past research has examined the effect of distraction at encoding on suggestibility errors in the Cognitive Interview, we made two main predictions: (a) If distracting younger adults at encoding had the same effect on the Cognitive Interview as it does on recognition and source identification tests, then we would observe a large number of suggestibility errors (e.g.. Lane, 2006). (b) If cognitive distraction at encoding was a mechanism that produced high-confidence memory errors, then we would observe a similar pattern of highconfidence errors by the young-distracted and older adult groups.

Method Participants. Fifty-nine students at the University of Virginia (age range: 18-29 years) were assigned to either the young-delay (30 participants) or the young-distracted (29 participants) groups and 30 older adults (age range: 6 0 -8 2 years) to the older group. To assess overall cognitive ability, we administered the digit symbol and the information subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (3rd ed.; Wechsler, 1997). These scores and other demo­ graphic information are shown in Table 1. As expected, older adults performed significantly worse on the digit symbol task than did either of the young adult groups (both ts > 6.48, ps < .0001); the two young groups did not differ from each other, f(57) = 1.32, p > .19. Likewise, older adults performed significantly better on the information task than did either of the young adult groups (both ts > 2.72, ps < .005); the two young groups did not differ from each other, f(57) < 1.00. This pattern is consistent with the standard finding that older adults perform worse than younger adults on tests of fluid intelligence but perform better on tests of crystallized intelligence (e.g., Baltes, Staudinger & Lindenberger, 1999; Salthouse, 1991). Materials and procedure. Participants were tested individu­ ally and watched a 4-min, 44-s s-long video that reenacted a burglary and police chase used in previous studies (Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Mitchell et al., 2003). Those in the older adult and

Table 1 Demographic Characteristics and Psychometric Scores fo r Each Group in Experiments 1 and 2 Group

Age (years)

Years of ed.

Information

Digit symbol

Older Young-delay Young-distracted

71 21 21

Experiment 1 16 23.1 (0.5) 14 20.7 (0.7) 15 20.8 (0.6)

64.0 (2.6) 85.8 (2.2) 89.4(1.6)

Older Y oung-delay Young-distracted

71 21 20

Experiment 2 16 22.3 (0.6) 15 20.6 (0.6) 13 21.1 (0.6)

59.0 (2.5) 92.1 (3.2) 93.6 (2.9)

Note. ed. = eduction. Values for the Information and Digit Symbol subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (3rd ed.) are means with standard errors in parentheses.

AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

young-delay groups were instructed to pay attention to the video. In contrast, those in the young-distracted group were told, “You’ll be watching a video while also listening to clips of popular music. Your job is to pay attention to both the video and the music. The video may stop at any moment, and your task will be to remember the title and artist of the last two songs that have played.” In fact, the video never stopped. Following Lane (2006; see also Zaragoza & Lane, 1998), we spliced 34 short clips of music, each lasting an average of 7 s, with a 2-s delay between each clip, onto the video so that the music began 12 s before the start of the video and ended 9 s after the end of the video. The music clips were taken from songs that are very familiar to our participants (e.g., “Jingle Bells,” “Macarena”). Following the video, there was a 5-min delay for the older and young-delay groups, which was spent completing a filler task. For the young-distracted group, this 5-min period was used to com­ plete a music-recognition task, which consisted of circling the names of songs that had been heard while watching the video. There were 50 song names on the music-recognition task, with 25 corresponding to songs that were actually heard and 25 being lures from the same genre. Following the delay or the music-recognition task, all participants answered 24 yes-no questions about the video—identical to the questions used in Dodson and Krueger (2006). Eight of the questions contained misleading suggestions and were identical to those used by Dodson and Krueger and by Mitchell et al. (2003). For instance, no ring was seen in the video, but one question stated that the thief found a ring in the dresser. The majority of misleading items referred to peripheral events (e.g., ring, thief wore gloves), but a few referred to events that might be considered more central (e.g., thief had a gun). As in Dodson and Krueger, the eight misleading items were drawn from a pool of 12 critical items. Three different versions of the ques­ tionnaire sampled critical items from the overall pool, so, between the three versions, all critical items were encountered. Following the questionnaire, the older and young-distracted groups experi­ enced a 10-min delay, whereas the young-delay group was dis­ missed and returned 2 days later to complete the MCI. The MCI began by moving participants to a different room from the previous phases so as to produce a slightly new environment. There were a series of discrete phases in the interview that oc­ curred in the following order: (a) Rapport building: The interviewer sought to create a relaxed and comfortable environment for the participant by engaging in friendly conversation. (b) Context reinstatement; Participants were instructed to re­ create the physical context of watching the video. Following Holliday et al. (2012) and Roberts and Higham (2002), participants were told, “I’d like you to mentally reinstate the environment that you were in when you saw the video. Please close your eyes. Picture yourself back in the room where you watched the film. Try to remember where you were sitting and where you were in relation to the video screen and how your seat felt and if you can remember any noises or smells that were present just before the video began.” (c) Report everything (RE): Participants were asked to report “everything you can remember about the video. Tell me every detail that you can recall even if it seems insignificant and even if you can only partially recall the detail. No detail is too small, and no memory is too faint.”

49

(d) Change order (CO): This phase involved recalling the video in the reverse chronological order. Specifically, participants were instructed, “Research has shown that it is sometimes helpful to recall an event in reverse order. So, I want you to tell me about the very last thing you remember in the video. From there, I’d like you to tell me everything you remember again just like last time, but now in reverse order. Once again, it is important that you tell me everything. No memory is too small.” (e) Tell me more (TMM): Participants were asked focused questions about all details that they had recalled during the previ­ ous two phases. Specifically, participants were told, “I’m now going to go through a couple of the things that you told me and try to clarify some information. You mentioned [insert item]; can you tell me anything more about that?” (f) Confidence ratings: In the final phase of the interview, we collected confidence ratings for every mentioned detail. Partici­ pants were instructed that “it’s very useful for a police officer to have an understanding of how confident a witness is about the details that he or she remembers. So, in this next phase, I will report back details that you recalled and I’d like you to rate how confident you are that this particular detail actually occurred in the video. To rate your confidence, we ask that you assign it a number of either 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, or 100%. Fifty percent means that it’s fundamentally a guess of whether or not it happened, and 100% means you’re absolutely sure.” After the MCI, everyone com­ pleted a source memory test. These data are not reported in the interest of brevity and because they generally corresponded to the data from the MCI. We coded and scored details that were recalled during the MCI as corresponding to one of four categories: (a) A video detail was only encountered in the video, (b) A both detail was both seen in the video and described in the questionnaire, (c) A misled detail was one of the eight misleading items suggested in the question­ naire. We used a strict criterion and only scored an item as misled if it exactly matched the misleading information. For example, reporting that the thief stole “jewelry” would be scored as an Incorrect item, because the questionnaire specifically stated that he stole a “ring.” (d) An incorrect detail was not encountered in the video (and was not one of the misleading items). Note that items in the video and both categories refer to details that were seen in the video and, therefore, constitute correct information. Three judges scored the data, and any inconsistencies were resolved by discussion.

Results and Discussion In the following analyses of variance (ANOVAs), we use partial eta-squared (rip) to express effect size. For follow-up t tests, we measured effect size with Cohen’s d. With respect to performance by the young-distracted group on the music-recognition distractor task, they correctly identified 15 (out of 25) titles and falsely identified one (out of 25) title. In addition, there was no evidence of a tradeoff (i.e., a negative correlation) in performance on the music-recognition distractor task and encoding of the video (e.g., ignore the music task to increase memory for the video), as there was a nonsignificant and positive correlation between musicrecognition distractor task performance and the quantity of items remembered from the video, r(29) = .31, p > .10.

DODSON, POWERS, AND LYTELL

50

Quantity recalled. The numbers of items of each type that were reported by older adults and by younger adults in the delay condition and the distraction condition are shown in Table 2. We analyzed the amount recalled with a 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 4 (item type: video, both, misled, incorrect) ANOVA which showed main effects of group, F(2, 86) = 6.91, MSE = 152.26, p = .002, T|p = .14; item type, F(3, 258) = 135.32, MSE = 75.22, p < .001, rip = .61; and a Group X Item Type interaction, F(6, 258) = 5.32, p < .001, yfe = .11. As shown in Table 2, both older and young-delay adults had a nearly identical pattern of performance; they recalled similar amounts overall and of each item type. In contrast, young adults in the distraction condition recalled roughly half as much overall relative to either of the other groups (ts > 3.49, ps < .001, Cohen’s ds > 1.06). Moreover, they recalled disproportionately fewer items from the video category relative to the other groups, thus producing the Group X Item Type interaction. This selective deficit in recalling items from the video was expected because the only time when the individuals in the young-distracted condition were distracted was while watching the video. Overall, the key point from this analysis is that our delay manipulation was successful in matching the overall amount of information recalled by the older adults and the young-delay adults. Misinformation effect. With respect to the misinformation effect, we examined the proportions of misled items (out of the eight encountered during the questionnaire) that were recalled during the MCI. Rates of incorrectly reporting misled items were nearly nonexistent for older adults (M = .05, SD = .08), youngdelay adults (M = .05, SD = .08), and young-distracted adults (M = .06, SD = .08), and a one-way ANOVA confirmed that there were no significant differences across the three groups, F(2, 86)
.90 for each group). However, accuracy steadily and significantly decreased from .95 correct during the initial stage to .88 correct during the final stage, r( 164) = 4.03, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.69. Note that overall accuracy was identical for the older adults and the young-delay adults. Interestingly, even though the young-distracted group recalled nearly half as much information as the other groups, their accuracy was comparably high. Amount reported at each stage. Are there age-related dif­ ferences in the amount of unique information that is elicited during each stage of the interview? Because participants frequently report the same information throughout all stages of the MCI (e.g., during the initial E stage and the subsequent CO stage), it is important to know how beneficial the subsequent stages are at eliciting infor­ mation that had not been recalled earlier. After all, if little or no previously unreported information is elicited after the initial recall stage, then there is little reason to force individuals to engage in multiple recall sessions. Of the total amount recalled across all stages of the MCI, we examined the proportion of this total that was elicited during each of the three stages; Table 4 shows these proportions. Because the proportions across the three stages sum to 1, it is impossible to perform an ANOVA on the proportions from all three stages (i.e., the three values are not independent). As shown in Table 4, the vast majority of correct information (i.e., the video items and both items) was recalled by all groups during the initial stage. More-

1.00 .

Accuracy. There were three recall stages in the MCI: (a) RE, (b) CO, and (c) TMM stages. We measured accuracy as the

Table 2 Quantities o f Details Recalled From the Video, Both, and Misled Sources and Other Incorrect Details Collapsed Across All Stages o f the Modified Cognitive Interview Item type Group

Video

Both

Older Young-delay Young-distracted

27.8 (3.4) 29.1 (4.5) 14.2(1.1)

15.6 (0.7) 16.2 (0.8) 11.5 (0.5)

Older No warning Retrieval warning Young-delay No warning Retrieval warning Young-distracted No warning Retrieval warning

21.7 ( 2 .2 ) 20.5 (3.1) 22.9 (3.2) 20.4 ( 1.7 ) 21.0 (2.9) 18.9(1.6) 10.8 ( 1. 1) 12.0(1.6) 9.6 (1.5)

24.0 ( 1. 0 ) 23.4(1.3) 24.7(1.5) 24.5 ( 0 . 7 ) 25.3 (1.0) 23.8 (0.9) 19.0 ( 1. 0 ) 20.9(1.5) 17.0(1.4)

Misled

Incorrect

Total

0.4 (0.1) 0.4 (0.1) 0.5 (0.1)

3.1 (0.9) 4.8 (1.3) 2.0 (0.4)

46.9 (4.6) 50.5 (6.1) 28.2(1.5)

0.4 0.6 0.2 0.6 0.9 0.3 0.7 1.1 0.3

5.3 4.5 6.1 5.5 5.7 5.3 3.1 2.8 3.4

51.4 49.1 53.9 51.1 53.8 48.3 33.6 36.8 30.4

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Note.

( 0 . 1)

(0.2) (0.1) ( 0 . 1) (0.3) (0.1) (0. 2) (0.4) (0.2)

(0 .8 ) (1.1) (1.3) ( 0 .4 ) (0.6) (0.6) ( 0 .4 ) (0.6) (0.6)

( 3 .4 )

(4.7) (5.0) ( 2. 2 ) (3.6) (2.6) ( 1 .9 ) (2.7) (2.7)

Values are means with standard errors in parentheses. In Experiment 2, the values in bold indicate the overall average for the group. The no warning and retrieval warning labels refer to conditions in which participants, respectively, either did not receive or received a warning immediately before the Modified Cognitive Interview to distrust the narrative.

AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

over, across the initial and final stages of the MCI, each group recalled nearly .90 of the total amount (i.e., there is very little unique information that is elicited during the middle, CO stage). Consequently, we analyzed the proportions from the initial and the final stages in our ANOVA. In addition, because roughly 25% of participants in each group recalled no incorrect information, we analyzed the incorrect information in a separate ANOVA from that conducted on the video items and both items. We analyzed the proportions of video items and both items that were recalled during the initial, RE and the final, TMM stages with a 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 2 (stage: RE, TMM) X 2 (item type: video, both) ANOVA.1 This analysis showed a main effect of stage, F (l, 86) = 199.55, MSE = 0.07, p < .00001, r)p = .70, which was qualified by a Stage X Group interaction, F(2, 86) = 8.44, MSE = 0.07, p = .0004, = .16. As presented in Table 4, older adults reported a significantly greater proportion of correct information during the initial, RE stage than did either of the young groups (M = .72, SD = .18 for older vs. M = .58, SD = .22 for young-delay and M = .61, SD = .20 for young-distracted), r(58) = 3.75, p = .0004, Cohen’s d = 0.98, and t(57) = 3.03, p = .004, Cohen’s d = 0.80, respectively. But, by contrast, the final, TMM stage elicited a significantly smaller proportion of information from older adults than it did from either group of younger adults (M = .17, SD = .17 for older vs. M = .31, SD = .22 for young-delay and M = .25, SD — .18 for youngdistracted), t(58) = 3.84, p = .0003, Cohen’s d = 1.00, and f(57) = 2.73, p = .008, Cohen’s d = 0.72, respectively. This analysis also showed a Stage X Item Type interaction, F (l, 86) = 64.42, MSE = 0.043, p < .0001, pp = .43, and no other significant effects (all Fs < 3.51). All groups reported a much greater proportion of both items (M = .72, SD = .18) than video items (M = .56, SD = .20) during the initial, RE stage, t(88) =

Table 3 Recall Accuracy During the Report Everything (RE), Change Order (CO), and Tell Me More (TMM) Stages o f the Modified Cognitive Interview (MCI) MCI stage Group

Older Young-delay Young-distracted

RE

CO

Experiment 1 .95 (.01) .94 (.02) .95 (.01) .91 (.02) .93 (.01) .90 (.04)

TMM

Overall

.87 (.03) .89 (.02) .89 (.03)

.92 (.01) .92 (.01) .91 (.02)

Experiment 2 Older No warning Retrieval warning Young-Delay No warning Retrieval warning Young-distracted No warning Retrieval warning

.93 (.01)

.91 (. 03)

.80 (. 02)

.88 (. 01)

.94 (.01) .92 (.01)

.88 (.05) .95 (.02)

.81 (.03) .79 (.04)

.88 (.02) .89 (.02)

.92 (. 01)

.83 (. 03)

.82 (. 02)

.86 (. 01)

.91(.01) .93 (.01)

.79 (.06) .87 (.04)

.83 (.02) .81 (.02)

.84 (.02) .87 (.02)

.92 (. 01)

.86 (. 03)

.82 (. 03)

.86 (. 01)

.92 (.02) .91 (.02)

.86 (.04) .86 (.04)

.85 (.04) .78 (.04)

.88 (.02) .85 (.02)

Note. Values are means with standard errors in parentheses. In Experi­ ment 2, the values in bold indicate the overall average for the group. The no warning and retrieval warning labels refer to conditions in which participants either did not receive or received a warning immediately before the Modified Cognitive Interview to distrust the narrative.

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Table 4 Proportions o f Correct Details (From the Video and Both Sources) and Incorrect Details Recalled During the Report Everything (RE), Change Order (CO), and Tell Me More (TMM) Stages o f the Modified Cognitive Interview (MCI) in Experiment 1 MCI stage Group Older Young-delay Young-distracted

Item type

RE

CO

TMM

Video Both Incorrect Video Both Incorrect Video Both Incorrect

.63 (.03) .81 (.02) .40 (.07) .49 (.04) .67 (.03) .31 (.07) .55 (.03) .67 (.04) .61 (.09)

.11 (.02) .11 (.02) .11 (.05) .09 (.01) .13 (.02) .11 (.05) .12 (.02) .16 (.03) .07 (.03)

.26 (.04) .08 (.02) .48 (.08) .42 (.04) .19 (.03) .58 (.07) .33 (.03) .17 (.03) .32 (.08)

Note. Values are means with standard errors in parentheses. These pro­ portions represent information that was recalled for the first time in each of these stages.

6.71, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.84, but reported a smaller propor­ tion of both items (M = .15, SD = .14) than video items (M = .34, SD = .21) during the final, TMM stage, f(88) = 8.67, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.08. Memorable items, such as those encountered in both the video and the questionnaire, were more often reported in the initial stage and less often in the final stage, as compared with those items only encountered in the video. With respect to the proportions of incorrect information that were reported in the initial, RE stage and the final, TMM stage, a 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 2 (stage: RE, TMM) ANOVA showed a significant Group X Stage interaction, F(2, 62) = 3.99, MSE = 0.22, p = .023, rfe = .11, and no other significant effects (all Fs < 1.00). Both older adults and youngdelay adults reported either comparable or greater amounts of incorrect information during the final, TMM stage than during the initial stage (older: M = .48, SD = .36 vs. M = .40, SD = .32, respectively, t[2\\ < 1.00, Cohen’s d = 0.23; young-delay: M = .58, SD = .33 vs. M = .31, SD = .33, respectively, r[21] = 2.10, p = .048, Cohen’s d = 0.82). In contrast, young-distracted adults tended to report more incorrect information during the initial, RE stage (M = .61, SD = .41) than during the final, TMM stage (M = .32, SD = .35), f(20) = 1.79, p = .088, Cohen’s d = 0.76. There are two key findings from this analysis. First, even though the overall amount and accuracy of the information that older adults recalled was nearly identical to the young-delay adults’ amount and accuracy, both groups differed greatly in terms of when correct information was reported during the MCI. Older adults benefited much less from the final stage than did the young-delay adults. Essentially, the final stage was roughly half as effective for older adults than for their accuracy- and quantitymatched counterparts at eliciting unreported correct information (i.e., 17% vs. 31%)— a difference that had a very large effect size. In addition, even though the young-distracted group recalled much

1 Too few misled items were reported to include this level— otherwise, there would be too much missing data.

DODSON, POWERS, AND LYTELL

52

less overall than either of the other groups, the proportion reported in each stage was very similar to the pattern shown by the youngdelay group. Confidence. Overall confidence in correct details (i.e., video and both items) and in incorrect details is shown in Figure 1. As in the preceding section, we examined confidence in the accuracy of video and both items separately from confidence in the incorrect information, because roughly 25% in each group did not recall any incorrect information.2 A 3 (group: older, young-delay, youngdistracted) X 2 (item type: video, both) ANOVA of confidence in the video and both items yielded main effects o f group, F (l, 86) = 8.99, MSE = 41.93 p = .0003, -rip = .17, and item type, F ( l, 86) = 52.01, MSE = 6.99, p < .0001, r\j = .38, and no significant interaction (F = 1.07). Older adults were significantly more con­ fident than the young-delay adults and the young-distracted adults, t(58) = 3.06, p = .003, Cohen’s d = 0.80 and t(57) = 4.02, p = .0002, Cohen’s d = 1.10, respectively. Both groups of younger adults were comparably confident about correct information, t(57) = 1.58, p = .12, Cohen’s d = 0.42. In addition, all groups were significantly more confident about the both items than about the video items. A one-way ANOVA o f confidence in the incorrect information revealed a main effect o f group, F (2, 63) = 3.41, MSE = 148.30, p = .039, Pp = .10. Older adults (M = 84%, SD = 13%) were significantly more confident in the accuracy of incorrect informa­ tion than were the young-delay adults (M = 76%, SD = 12%), f(43) = 2.19, p = .034, Cohen’s d = 0.65, and were comparable in confidence to the young-distracted adults (M = 84%, SD = 12%; t < 1.00). The young-distracted adults were also more confident in the incorrect information than were the young-delay adults, t(42) = 2.36, p = .023, Cohen’s d = 0.71. One of our primary predictions is that older adults, as compared with their accuracy- and quantity-matched young-delay counter-

100

Figure 1. Average confidence ratings for correct details (i.e., from the video and both sources) and incorrect details that were recalled by the older, young-delay, and young-distracted groups in Experiment 1. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. Video and both refer to details that were either encountered only in the video or in both the video and the postvideo questionnaire, respectively. See the online article for the color version of this figure.

parts, would be disproportionately more confident about incorrect items than about correct items. In other words, older adults’ tendency to confidently misremember events would mean that the difference in confidence between older and young-delay adults would be much greater for the incorrect items than for the correct items. W e tested this prediction with a focused contrast analysis, which many statisticians have noted is the most appropriate and powerful method o f testing a priori hypotheses (e.g., Rosenthal, Rosnow, & Rubin, 2000; Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1996). Using contrast weights o f - 5 , —1, 1, 2, 1, and 2, for the young-delay incorrect, older incorrect, young-delay video, older video, youngdelay both, and older both conditions, respectively, an analysis of confidence ratings to incorrect, video, and both items showed that this contrast was significant F ( l, 86) = 135.83, MSE = 52.62, p < .001, tip = .61. As is clear in Figure 1, there was a much larger difference between the older and young-delay groups in confi­ dence about incorrect items than there was about confidence for correct items. Further support for our hypothesis that older adults would be prone to confidently misrecollect past events comes from an anal­ ysis o f the proportion of incorrect items that were assigned either high confidence (e.g., a rating o f 90% or 100%) or low confidence (e.g., a rating o f 50% or 60%). Older adults were much more likely to assign high confidence (M = .50, SD = .37) than low confi­ dence (M = .15, SD = .30) to incorrect items, f(21) = 2.86, p = .009, Cohen’s d = 1.04. In contrast, young-delay participants assigned comparable proportions o f high confidence (M = .31, SD = .30) and low confidence (M = .35, SD = .30) to incorrect items, t{22) = .34, p = .74, Cohen’s d = 0.13. Moreover, both older and young-delay adults showed a similar pattern of assigning high- and low-confidence ratings to correctly recalled details. They both assigned an overwhelmingly greater proportion of highconfidence than low-confidence ratings to video items, (older adults: high-confidence M = .84, SD = .15 vs. low-confidence M = .03, SD = .05, f[29] = 22.97, p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 7.24; young-delay adults: high-confidence M = .76, SD = .14 v's. low-confidence M = .09, SD = .08, f[29] = 17.91, p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 5.88) and to both items (older adults: high-confidence M = .92, SD = .09 vs. low-confidence M = .01, SD = .03, t[29] = 47.86, p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 13.57; young-delay adults: highconfidence M = .86, SD = .12 vs. low-confidence M = .04, SD = .05, ?[29] = 26.56, p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 8.92). Overall, there were three central findings from this experiment. W hen compared with a young-delay group that was matched with older adults on the overall amount and accuracy o f what was remembered, the older adults showed two notable differences. First, older adults were more confident about both correct and incorrect information, but they were disproportionately more con­ fident about the accuracy of incorrect information. Moreover, older adults were more likely to assign high confidence than low confidence to incorrect items, whereas young-delay adults showed no such difference. This pattern occurred because younger adults— even after a delay— were better calibrated than were older adults at assigning low confidence to incorrect details and high confidence to correct details. The second notable difference was

2 Too few participants recalled misled items— only nine older adults, 10 young-delayed adults, and 12 young-distracted adults.

AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

that older adults recalled a greater proportion of information dur­ ing the initial stage and a smaller proportion of information during the final stage. This latter finding is particularly striking when compared with the young-distracted group. Even though youngdistracted participants recalled nearly half as much information as the older adults, the final stage of the MCI was still more beneficial for this young group than it was for older adults at eliciting correct details that had not been recalled previously. Finally, the third central result was the near absence of suggestibility effects, which replicated Holliday et al.’s (2012) finding that the MCI was par­ ticularly effective at minimizing suggestibility effects in both younger and older adults. In addition, we observed that the MCI was even successful at preventing suggestibility errors in a condi­ tion— divided attention at encoding—that has been shown to pro­ duce robust amounts of suggestibility errors on other kinds of memory tests (e.g., Lane, 2006).

Experiment 2 Experiment 1 showed that there are larger age differences in confidence about the accuracy of incorrect information than cor­ rect information under conditions in which there are no age dif­ ferences in either the accuracy or the overall quantity of informa­ tion that is recalled about an earlier event. Moreover, regardless of whether the overall amount recalled by older adults was compa­ rable to or greater than that recalled by the young-delay and the young-distracted adults, respectively, the final stage of the MCI was much less beneficial to older adults than to younger adults at eliciting previously unrecalled information. Experiment 2 sought to replicate these findings. In addition, Experiment 2 investigated older adults’ ability to resist making suggestibility errors during the MCI when the mis­ information has been discredited. Given the very low suggestibility rate in Experiment 1, we took advantage of numerous findings that show that increasing exposure to misinformation will increase suggestibility effects (e.g., Echterhoff, Groll, & Hirst, 2007; Mitchell & Zaragoza, 2001; Zaragoza & Mitchell, 1996). The basic procedure in this experiment was nearly identical to that used in Experiment 1. The primary difference was that we incorporated elements of Echterhoff, Hirst, and Hussy (2005) and Echterhoff et al. (2007), who showed that younger adults were able to reduce the occurrence of suggestibility errors on a variety of different mem­ ory tests when they were warned about the untrustworthiness of the misinformation after having already read the misinformation (for similar results, see Underwood & Pezdek, 1998). A few studies have shown that warnings can reduce suggest­ ibility errors in younger adults even when they occur after the individual has encountered the misinformation— so-called re­ trieval warnings (e.g., Chambers & Zaragoza, 2001; Eakin, Schreiber, & Sergent-Marshall, 2003; Echterhoff et al., 2005). Retrieval warnings are effective because they orient individuals to carefully monitor remembered information (e.g., Johnson et al., 1993). To our knowledge, no one has examined the effect of retrieval warnings on older adults’ ability to resist the misinfor­ mation effect. In fact, across all of the different kinds of falsememory paradigms, very few studies have examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of retrieval warnings (e.g., McCabe & Smith, 2002). Within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott para­ digm, McCabe and Smith showed that younger adults, but not

53

older adults, benefit from a retrieval warning about the falsememory effect. The McCabe and Smith (2002) data, combined with research showing decreased cognitive control and inhibitory abilities in older adults (e.g., Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, 2007), suggest that retrieval warnings will be less beneficial for older adults than for younger adults at minimizing the effects of misinformation. Fol­ lowing Echterhoff et al. (2007), we also examined the effects of retrieval warnings on reporting correct information from a poste­ vent narrative. If a retrieval warning to distrust a postevent narra­ tive causes individuals to withhold reporting of anything stated in the narrative, then not only will this warning reduce false memo­ ries for the misinformation, it will also reduce true information contained in the narrative. As in Experiment 1, older adults, young adults in a delayed condition, and young adults in a divided attention condition viewed a video of a mock robbery. They then read a narrative that ostensibly described the events in the video but contained misin­ formation. The narrative was read twice so as to increase the suggestibility effect. Before the MCI, some participants were warned that the narrative contained misleading details that were not depicted in the video, whereas the remaining participants received no retrieval warning.

Method Participants. Ninety-six young adults (age range: 18-28 years) were assigned to either the young-delay or the youngdistracted groups, with 48 participants in each group. Within each young group, there were equal numbers in the retrieval warning and no warning conditions. Forty-six older adults (age range: 60-90 years) were in the older group, with 22 in the retrieval warning condition and 24 in the no warning condition. The demo­ graphic information for these groups as well as their scores from the digit symbol and information subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (3rd ed.) (Wechsler, 1997) are shown in Table 1. Both groups of younger adults performed significantly better than the older adults on the digit symbol task (both rs > 10.53, both ps < .0001); there were no significant differences between the two young groups, t(94) < 1.00. Although older adults’ performance on the information subtest was numerically better than that of both young groups, this difference was significant between the older and young-delay groups, 1(92) = 2.18, p = .032, but not between the older and young-distracted groups, t(92) = 1.51, p = .13. The two young groups performed comparably, f(94) < 1.00. Overall, the cognitive ability scores replicated the well-established finding of age-related decrements in performance on fluid intelligence tests and increments in performance on crystallized intelligence tests. Materials and procedure. The materials and procedure were identical to what was used in Experiment 1, except for the follow­ ing two differences. First, instead of introducing the misinforma­ tion with a questionnaire, we used a narrative that described the events in the video and contained eight pieces of misleading information, drawn from a pool of 12 misleading items. There were three different versions of the narrative that differed in the sample of misleading items from the overall pool. Following Echterhoff et al. (2007), we examined the effect of retrieval warnings by creating a pool of 12 true items that had been seen in

54

DODSON, POWERS, AND LYTELL

the video, such as that the “thief steals a blue camera bag.” Each narrative contained eight of these 12 items, and we refer to these items as counterbalanced-both items to distinguish them from other both items that participants happened to recall. The remain­ ing four (out of the 12) items were seen only in the video, and we refer to them as counterbalanced-video items to distinguish them from other video items. Across the three different versions of the narrative, we counterbalanced the items that served in the counterbalanced-both and counterbalanced-video conditions. After reading the narrative, participants were asked to read it a second time. The second difference from Experiment 1 involved the warning manipulation. Before beginning the MCI, participants in the re­ trieval warning condition were given a piece of paper that stated, “Please be aware that the narrative you read earlier may have contained some misleading information. Please only report that which you remember happening in the video.” In contrast, those in the no warning condition read a piece of paper that stated, “Please take a moment to think about the narrative that you read earlier.” All other details about the materials and procedure were identical to what was used in Experiment 1.

R esults and D iscussion With respect to performance on the distractor task, the youngdistracted group correctly identified 18 (out of 25) titles and falsely identified none of the lures. As in Experiment 1, there was no evidence of a tradeoff in performance on the music-recognition distractor task and encoding of the video. The correlation between distractor task performance and the quantity of items remembered from the video was nonsignificant, r(37) = .12, p > .45.3 Quantity recalled. The numbers of items of each type that were reported by older adults and younger adults in the delay condition and the distraction condition are shown in Table 2. As in Experiment 1, older adults and younger adults in the delayed condition showed a nearly identical pattern of results. They re­ called comparable amounts of information overall (M = 51.4, SD = 23.1 vs. M = 51.1, SD = 15.3, respectively), and they recalled similar amounts of each item type. We analyzed the amount recalled by all three groups with a 3 (group: older, youngdelay, young-distracted) X 4 (item type: video, both, misled, incorrect) X 2 (instruction: retrieval warning vs. no warning) ANOVA, which showed main effects of group, F(2,136) = 15.98, MSE = 77.70, p < .0001, ti3 = .19; item type, F(3, 408) = 400.86, MSE = 38.42, p < .0001, qj; = .75; and a Group X Item Type interaction, F(6, 411) = 8.53, p < .0001, rjp = .11. No other effects were significant (all F ’s < 1.45). The main effect of group occurred because, as in Experiment 1, younger adults in the distraction condition (M = 33.6, SD = 13.4) recalled much less overall than did each of the other groups (both fs > 4.59, ps < .001, Cohen’s ds > 0.93). Likewise, as in Experiment 1, the Group X Item Type interaction occurred be­ cause the young-distracted group recalled disproportionately fewer items that only occurred in the video, which is not surprising because they were distracted only during the video. Overall, our delay manipulation was successful in matching older and youngdelay adults in terms of the overall quantity of information that was remembered during the MCI.

Finally, it is important to comment on a difference between Experiments 1 and 2 in the pattern of items recalled from the video and both categories: As Table 2 shows, in Experiment 1, more video than both items were recalled, whereas in Experiment 2, participants recalled slightly more both than video items. We attribute this different pattern to the fact that participants read a detailed narrative twice in Experiment 2, whereas they read a series of yes-no questions in Experiment 1. Retrieval warnings and recall of misled items. We exam­ ined the effect of a retrieval warning on the proportion of misled items that were recalled with a 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 2 (instruction: retrieval warning vs. no warn­ ing) ANOVA. This analysis yielded a main effect of instruction, F (l, 136) = 11.98, MSE = 0.017, p < .001, q 3 = .08, and no other significant effects (all Fs < 1.23). All groups of participants reported significantly fewer misled items when they had been warned to ignore the narrative (M = .03, SD = .08) than when they had not been warned (M = .11, SD = .17). The lack of an interaction with group indicates that the warning instructions were just as effective for older adults as they were for both groups of younger adults. Retrieval warnings and recall of video and both items. To examine the effect of a retrieval warning on recall of correct information that was encountered in either the video only or in both the video and the narrative, we analyzed the rate at which the counterbalanced-both and counterbalanced-video items were re­ called in the different conditions. If a retrieval warning about the narrative causes individuals to distrust and withhold anything encountered in the narrative, then this should reduce the proportion of both items that are reported relative to video items. Following Echterhoff and colleagues (e.g., Echterhoff et al., 2007), we ad­ dressed this question by analyzing recall performance for only the 12 items (i.e., the eight both items and four video items) that were systematically counterbalanced across the video and both condi­ tions. A 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 2 (instruction: retrieval warning vs. no warning) X 2 (item type: both vs. video) ANOVA of the recall rate of these both and video items showed main effects of group, F(2, 136) = 18.44, MSE = 0.037, p < .0001, q 3 = .21, and item type, F (l, 136) = 76.18, MSE = 0.031, p < .0001, T|p = .36, and no other significant effects (all Fs < 1.06). Older adults (M = .33, SD = .22) recalled a greater proportion of both and video items than did the two younger adult groups (young-delay: M = .20, SD = .20; young-distracted: M = .16, SD = .20), and all groups recalled a greater proportion of both (M = .32, SD = .20) than video items (M = .14, SD = .19). In contrast to the analysis of misled items, there was no effect of a retrieval warning on recall of correct information encountered in the narrative (for both items; no warning M = .34, SD = .21, and retrieval warning M = .30, SD = .20; for video items; no warning M = .14, SD = .19, and retrieval warning M = .13, SD = .20). Echterhoff et al. (2007) observed that retrieval warnings only diminished memory performance for the both items when these items were peripheral events in the video. They found no effect of retrieval warnings on memory for the both and video items when they referred to central events. It is likely that we failed to observe

3 Due to experimenter error, there was no distractor task data from 11 participants.

AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

an effect of retrieval warnings on these true memories because many of them referred to central events, although we did not systematically manipulate this centrality variable as Echterhoff et al. (2007) did. Accuracy. We measured accuracy at each stage of the MCI as the proportion of total information recalled at a particular stage that was correct (i.e., the sum of video and both details divided by the sum of video, both, misled, and incorrect details at each stage). A 3 (group: older, young-delay, young-distracted) X 3 (stage: RE, CO, TMM) X 2 (instruction: retrieval warning vs. no warning) ANOVA of the accuracy of the recalled information showed a main effect of stage, F(2, 258) = 22.47, MSE = 0.019, p < .0001, rip = .15, which was qualified by a Stage X Instruction interaction, F(2, 258) = 3.29, MSE = 0.019, p < .05, qj; = .02. There were no other significant effects in this analysis (all Fs < 1.74). As in Experiment 1 and as shown in Table 3, accuracy was very high overall, and the effect of stage shows that it was highest in the initial RE stage (M = .92, SD = .07) and was steadily but significantly lower in each of the subsequent stages (CO: M = .87, SD = .20; TMM: M = .81, SD = .16; all ts > 2.99, all ps < .003, all Cohen’s ds > 0.37). However, the Stage X Instruction inter­ action showed that although there was a steady decline in accuracy across the stages for both the no warning and the retrieval warning conditions, the pattern of decline was different for each condition. Specifically, for the no warning condition, there was a large drop in accuracy from the initial, RE stage (M = .92, SD = .07) to the subsequent, CO stage (M = .85, SD = .23), .90), (b) very few false memories overall, and (c) a degree of confidence in correct information that was no different from that shown by the young-delay group. In fact, for each of these three points, the young-distracted group performed no differently than the young-delay group, even though they recalled nearly half as much information. However, there was one element of the young-distracted individ­ ual’s performance that showed an inconsistent pattern across the two experiments: confidence in incorrect information. In Experiment 1, young-distracted adults showed relatively high confidence in incorrect information that was no different from that shown by older adults, whereas in Experiment 2, they showed significantly lower confidence than that shown by older adults. This inconsistency across the two experiments could be a result of statistical error. In Experiment 1 in particular, only a subset of the young-distracted and older participants recalled an incorrect item, which contributed to low statistical power for this particular analysis, whereas in Experiment 2, there was a greater power to detect an effect. If Experiment 2’s results reflect the true state of affairs, then these results rule out our hypothesis that distraction at encoding would duplicate in younger adults the pattern of high-confidence errors that we observed in older adults. This in turn suggests that distraction at encoding is not the mechanism that pro­ duces older adults’ vulnerability to making high-confidence re­ sponses. But, given the inconsistent pattern between the experiments, further work on this point is needed. Overall, however, the MCI appears more effective than typical memory tests at eliciting accurate information from individuals who were distracted at encoding. The third significant finding involves misinformation effects and retrieval warnings. First, Experiment 1 replicated Holliday et al.’s (2012) finding of very low misinformation effects with a Cognitive Interview. Second, Experiment 2 used a manipulation to increase misinformation effects to examine the effects of warning individuals immediately before the MCI to disregard what was read in the narrative because it may have contained misinformation—a so-called retrieval warning. Replicating Echterhoff et al. (2007), this retrieval warning reduced younger adults’ tendency to report misinformation relative to a no warning condition—a reduction that was comparable in both the young-delay and the young-distraction conditions. Inter­ estingly, retrieval warnings were just as effective in older adults as they were with younger adults at reducing the reporting of misleading information. To our knowledge, this is the first finding across all false-memory paradigms to show that retrieval warnings can be effective in older adults. As Echterhoff et al. (2007) suggested, re­ trieval warnings likely orient individuals to consider the source of memorial information (e.g., does the recalled information originate from the video or from reading the narrative?), which increases the probability that individuals will become aware of misleading items. Our observation that retrieval warnings were effective in older adults is consistent with Multhaup, De Leonardis, and Johnson’s (1999) finding of reduced eyewitness suggestibility effects in older adults when they were given a source identification test relative to a yes-no recognition test (see also Multhaup, 1995). Multhaup et al. attributed these results to the source test’s greater demand on participants to evaluate the origin of their memory using strict retrieval criteria (see also Dodson & Johnson, 1993). The fourth significant finding is that both experiments show that the final, focused-retrieval stage of the MCI is much less effective for

older adults than for younger adults at eliciting previously unreported information. Older adults recalled a much greater proportion of cor­ rect information during the first recall stage and a much smaller proportion of correct information during the final, TMM stage than did their accuracy- and quantity-matched young-delay counterparts. Notably, these group differences in the benefits of the final stage corresponded to very large effect sizes in Experiment 1 (Cohen’s d = 1.00) and moderately large effect sizes in Experiment 2 (Cohen’s d = 0.68). From a practical standpoint, these results indicate that investi­ gators have much less to gain from older than from younger adults with repeated inquiries (during the same session) about a witnessed event. Theoretically, it is striking that older adults benefited less than younger adults from repeated acts of retrieval when (a) there were no age differences in either the overall amount or accuracy of the recalled information and (b) we used a retrieval test—the MCI—that provides much retrieval support and organization, such as the use of focused retrieval questions in the final stage, which should have been partic­ ularly beneficial for older adults. But this pattern of diminishing gains for older adults relative to younger adults is also present in a related paradigm: Henkel (2007, 2008) has shown that across repeated re­ trieval attempts, older adults are less likely than younger adults to recall previously unreported information about a prior event. The results from these different paradigms suggest that proactive interfer­ ence affects older adults’ subsequent recall attempts more so than it does those of younger adults. One question, though, is whether there are differences between the Cognitive Interview and repeated retrieval paradigms in the effects of proactive interference on older adults. On the basis of Craik’s (1986) idea that older adults have difficulty “self-initiating” appropriate retrieval strategies, one would expect that repeated inquiries that involve focused questions (e.g., as imple­ mented in the MCI) would be more beneficial for older adults at eliciting previously unreported information than would a repeated inquiry, like that in the repeated retrieval paradigm, that involves asking the older adult to recall the event again. This is a question for future research. Finally, the finding from both experiments with some of the most massive effect sizes (i.e., Cohen’s d > 2.20) involved the kind of information that was reported by all participants during the initial and final recall stages of the MCI. Of all the correct information that was recalled, a much larger proportion of both items than video items was remembered during the initial recall stage, whereas a much smaller proportion of both items than video items was remembered during the final stage. These data indicate that particularly memorable items, such as the information encountered in both the video and the narra­ tive, may benefit less from the Cognitive Interview’s combination of repeated recall stages and differing mnemonic strategies and focused retrieval than will relatively weaker items. At the same time, output interference likely contributed to the effects seen for the less memo­ rable items. In other words, because all individuals recalled an over­ whelming amount of information during the initial recall stage from the memorable both source (e.g., about 75% of the recalled both items were reported during the initial stage), this may have contributed to output interference, which inhibited recall of the weaker, video items during this stage. In short, memorially weak items that are not recalled on the first attempt may greatly benefit—and certainly more so than memorially strong items—from repeated questioning. In sum, although the Cognitive Interview is more effective than many other retrieval methods at eliciting correct information and

AGING AND THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW

reducing misinformation, this retrieval technique does not eliminate older adults’ tendency to report incorrect information with highconfidence.

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Aging, confidence, and misinformation: recalling information with the cognitive interview.

In 2 experiments, younger and older adults witnessed a simulated robbery, received misleading information about the event, and then were interviewed w...
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