Typicality and misinformation: Two sources of distortion.

Abstract

This study examined the effect of two sources of memory error: exposure to post-event information and extracting typical contents from schemata. Participants were shown a video of a bank robbery and presented with high- and low-typicality misinformation extracted from two normative studies. The misleading suggestions consisted of either changes in the original video information or additions of completely new contents. In the subsequent recognition task the post-event misinformation produced memory impairment. The participants used the underlying schema of the event to extract high-typicality information which had become integrated with episodic information, thus giving rise to more hits and false alarms for these items. However, the effect of exposure to misinformation was greater on low-typicality items. There were no differences between changed or added information, but there were more false alarms when a low-typicality item was changed to a high-typicality item.