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A meta‐analysis of the effects of acute alcohol intoxication on witness recall
Author(s) -
Jores Theo,
Colloff Melissa F.,
Kloft Lilian,
Smailes Harriet,
Flowe Heather D.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3533
Subject(s) - recall , psychology , witness , alcohol intoxication , alcohol , affect (linguistics) , cued recall , social psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , recall test , poison control , injury prevention , free recall , clinical psychology , medicine , communication , medical emergency , computer science , biochemistry , chemistry , programming language
Summary There is widespread belief in the legal system that alcohol impairs witness testimony. Nevertheless, most laboratory studies examining the effects of alcohol on witness testimony suggest that alcohol may affect the number of correct but not incorrect details recalled. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions because sample sizes, testing paradigms, and recall measures vary between individual studies. We conducted a meta‐analysis to address this issue. We found alcohol intoxication had a significant and moderate sized effect on the number of correct details recalled ( g = 0.40). The effect of alcohol on the number of incorrect details recalled was not significant. Further, the effect of alcohol on the recall of correct details was significantly moderated by multiple factors like intoxication level, the retention interval length between encoding and recall, and the types of questions asked (i.e., free recall vs. cued recall). We discuss the applied implications of the results.