Eyewitness Memory:Internal Mechanism Of The Retrieval Enhanced Suggestibility Effect

Retrieval-enhanced susceptibility effect(RES)means a phenomenon that the participants’ susceptibility to the subsequent misleading information will be increased after retrieval. Since Chan, Thomas and Bulevich discovered this effect,the phenomenon has become another hot topic in the research field of false memory.In the previous literature, most studies’ premise is that the first testing is the clue recall.According to the previous literature,we summaried three kinds of theory that can explain the phenomenon.The first is allocation theoretical theory,that is,the previous testing focus the participants’ attention on the specific cues,thus let the participants pay more attention to these cues,resulting in the increased susceptibility to misleading information,then the more error of peripheral details generated. The second is learning theory,namely that,due to the similarity of video learning and misleading information learning, the video learning promotes the participants’ learning on the subsequent misleading information,resulting in increased susceptibility to misleading information. The last theory is reconstruction theory,which is,for the first time memories keeps participants’ memory in an excited state,in the state of excited,memory can easily be reconstruction,therefore,when misleading information occur,the participants ’ the original memory was rebuilt,resulting in RES effect.The previous research are not identical on methods and approaches to the above three kinds of theory,we urgently need to explore the internal mechanism of the three theories by a consistent method,and many previous studies focused on the center details and peripheral details,little research added the neutral details,but the existence of neutral details is helpful to improve the integrity of the details.And previous research’ premise is the first testing is the clue recall.However,discussing the RES effect under the situation that the first testing is free recall is more ecological.To sum up, in our research we use three experiments to explore the internal mechanism that caused the RES effect. Experiment one explored that whether it can cause the RES effect under the condition that the first testing is the free recall; Experiment two and three discussed the explaining role of the allocation attention theory, learning theory and reconstruction theoryResults show that(1) it also have RES effect under the condition that free testing is free recall, and free recall increased the recall rate of misleading information memory in final testing. The participants that are tested recalled less peripheral details than the ones that are not tested. Whether the participants accepted the first test or not, they both recalled low rate offalse memory on the center misleading information and correct recall rate at the center detail did not change because of the different test conditions.(2) in the experiment of RES effect,confidence is not affected by the classification of details.(3) compared with control group one,the reverce group have the RES effect, but compared with the control group two, reverse variant group did not have the RES effect, and reverse and reverse variant group didn’t lower the effect of RES. Thus it can be seen that the allocation attention theory and learning theory are not enough to explain the effect of RES.(4) compared with the immediate group, delay group have the RES, and after delay,the RES effect reduced. Reconstruction theory can be used to explain the effect of RES.