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Judging the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies using retrieval effort cues
Author(s) -
Gustafsson Philip U.,
Lindholm Torun,
Jönsson Fredrik U.
Publication year - 2021
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.3854
Subject(s) - psychology , eyewitness memory , eyewitness testimony , task (project management) , cognitive psychology , statement (logic) , social psychology , contrast (vision) , recall , artificial intelligence , computer science , management , political science , law , economics
Summary Recent research has shown that incorrect statements in eyewitness testimonies contain more cues to effortful memory retrieval than correct statements. In two experiments, we attempted to improve judgments of testimony accuracy by informing participants about these effort cues. Participants read eyewitness testimony transcripts and judged statement accuracy. Performance was above chance in both experiments, but there was only a significant effect of the effort‐cue instruction in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, we also compared judgment accuracy between police detectives, police students and laypersons, and found no significant difference, in contrast to previous studies. Moreover, the current study corroborates previous findings that (a) judging testimony accuracy is a difficult task and (b) people spontaneously rely on effort cues to some extent when judging accuracy. However, a complete reliance on effort cues showed substantially better performance than relying on one's own judgments skills at best, and offered equal performance at worst.