Effects of Perceptual Load on Eyewitness Memory Are Moderated by Individual Differences in Cognitive Ability
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Effects of perceptual load on eyewitness memory are moderated by individual differences in cognitive ability. Ciara M. Greene*, Ruth Maloney-Derham & Kirsty Mulligan School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Ireland *Corresponding author. Please send all correspondence to [email protected] Data availability statement: The materials, data and analysis code associated with this paper are publicly available via the Open Science Framework and may be found at https://osf.io/fhvms/. Disclosure Statement: The authors report no conflict of interest. Word count: 5,765 1 Abstract Previous research has identified perceptual load – the amount of perceptual processing required by a scene – as a potentially important factor in eyewitness memory. Here, we investigated whether effects of perceptual load on eyewitness memory for a simulated crime are moderated by individual differences in cognitive ability. We presented participants with a video of a simulated crime that imposed either high or low perceptual load, followed by a written narrative which contained a mixture of neutral and misleading descriptions of critical details. We examined the effects of three cognitive variables (working memory capacity, verbal cognitive ability and analytical reasoning) on participants’ ability to accurately recall details of the video in both the misinformation and control conditions, and to detect a change in the clothing of a main character. General cognitive ability was associated with improved global memory for details of the event, and enhanced change detection under load. Greater WM capacity and a tendency towards analytical reasoning were both associated with resistance to misinformation under conditions of high perceptual load. We conclude that higher levels of cognitive ability, assessed across a number of domains, may enable eyewitnesses to withstand the effects of perceptual load and preserve the accuracy of their memories. Keywords Misinformation; false memory; eyewitness memory; perceptual load; individual differences; working memory capacity; cognitive ability; analytical reasoning 2 Introduction Years of research on the reconstructive nature of memory have demonstrated that memories for the events in our lives are frequently incomplete or fragmented, and susceptible to distortion (Loftus, 2005). This research has been particularly impactful in the field of eyewitness memory; post-event misinformation, delivered in the form of leading questions or as an inaccurate written description of the event, has been shown to reliably produce memory distortions in eyewitnesses (see Frenda, Knowles, Saletan, & Loftus, 2013 for a review). For example, an eyewitness may falsely recall seeing glass on the scene of a car accident if the cars were described as ‘smashing’ into each other (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). More recently, research has aimed to uncover the circumstantial and individual factors that may make an eyewitness more likely to experience memory distortions. One such circumstantial factor is the availability of attentional resources, with evidence suggesting that memory accuracy for witnessed events decreases and memory distortions increase when attention is engaged elsewhere – for example, if participants are completing a divided attention task during encoding (Lane, 2006; Zaragoza and Lane, 1998), are distracted by electronic devices (Hyman, Sarb, & Wise-Swanson, 2014) or are simply concerned with their own thoughts and not expecting the event (Hyman, Wulff, & Thomas, 2018). Attention may also be captured by specific contents of a scene to the detriment of other details; this can be seen in the ‘weapon-focus effect’, whereby eyewitnesses’ attention is drawn to a weapon in the scene, resulting in reduced ability to identify the perpetrator and increased susceptibility to misinformation (Loftus, Loftus, & Messo, 1987; Pickel, 1998; Saunders, 2009). Evidence suggests that attentional resources may be exhausted by the mere presence of extraneous clutter in a scene (Murphy and Greene, 2016). It is theorised that this clutter adds to the ‘perceptual load’ of the scene – that is, the quantity of perceptual information that must be processed in a given task (Macdonald and Lavie, 2008). Perceptual load theory (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004) is 3 an influential model of selective attention which proposes that (1) perceptual capacity is limited and (2) attention proceeds automatically, processing all stimuli in a task or scene until perceptual capacity is reached. Once all perceptual resources have been exhausted, no further details of the task or scene can be processed. In the visual search tasks in which perceptual load theory is typically applied, this results in an inability to process distractor stimuli, and thus reduced distractor interference in response to a target stimulus. A number of paradigms have been developed which manipulate perceptual load in different ways – e.g. by changing the number or complexity of stimuli to be processed (Lavie, 2005), by requiring a perceptually easy or difficult discrimination between two stimuli (Macdonald and Lavie, 2008) or by requiring participants to identify a stimulus based on either a single feature or a conjunction of features (Murphy and Greene, 2017c). Adaptations of these paradigms to real-world contexts have found that under high perceptual load, participants are less likely to notice both task-relevant and task-irrelevant sounds while driving (Murphy and Greene, 2017b), fail to spot a 30-foot elephant to the side of simulated a road they are driving on (Murphy and Greene, 2017a) and fail to detect a change in the identity of a person they are interacting with (Murphy and Murphy, 2018). They may also recall fewer details and more misinformation in eyewitness memory paradigms (Murphy and Greene, 2016) and be less accurate at identifying faces from a video of a simulated crime (Greene, Murphy, & Januszewski, 2017). These results suggest that when perceptual load is high, and attentional resources are consumed in a bottom-up manner, the remaining details of a scene cannot be fully encoded. This leads to increased rates of inattentional blindness and change blindness, and a less complete memory which may be more susceptible to distortion. A separate body of research has investigated effects of individual differences in cognitive ability on eyewitnesses’ ability to recall details accurately and resist misinformation. In a large sample of Chinese students, Zhu and colleagues (2010) found that susceptibility to misinformation in an eyewitness paradigm was negatively correlated with measures of intelligence, perception and memory. Relatedly, a recent study reported that higher levels of cognitive ability, as measured by 4 the Wordsum task (Thorndike and Gallup, 1944), predicts the probability of forming false memories from ideologically congruent misinformation presented in the form of fake news stories (Murphy, Loftus, Grady, Levine, & Greene, 2019). Greater working memory (WM) capacity has also been associated with reduced susceptibility to misinformation in an eyewitness memory task (Jaschinski and Wentura, 2002) and reduced false recognition of unpresented items (Gerrie and Garry, 2007; Watson, Bunting, Poole, & Conway, 2005). These previous studies employed the Operation Span (OSPAN) task, a well-validated paradigm which assesses WM capacity by requiring participants to perform mathematical operations while maintaining a series of words or letters in WM (Turner and Engle, 1989; Unsworth, Heitz, Schrock, & Engle, 2005). It has been suggested that participants with greater WM capacity can build a more detailed mental model of a scene during encoding, and are thus better equipped to reject misinformation as inconsistent with their existing model (Jaschinski and Wentura, 2002). A novel factor that may play a role in the suggestibility of eyewitnesses is an individual’s tendency to engage in analytical reasoning. Using a measure of analytical reasoning style – the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005; Thomson and Oppenheimer, 2016) - Pennycook & Rand (2019) found that participants with a greater tendency towards analytical reasoning were better able to resist misinformation from fake news. This study focused on participants’ belief that the fabricated events depicted in the stories had occurred, rather than explicit false memory for the events, but it is reasonable to suppose that this tendency might also underlie resistance to false memory formation. The source monitoring framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) maintains that discriminating between true and false memories relies on two cognitive processes operating in parallel. The first is a relatively fast heuristic process that evaluates perceptual, temporal and semantic features of a mental experience and makes a quick judgement as to whether they match the characteristics of a true memory. This is supplemented by slower, more controlled systematic processes, such as reasoning about the plausibility of the memory or its compatibility with existing knowledge or beliefs. An individual’s tendency to reason analytically may therefore be expected to 5 increase reliance on systematic rather than heuristic processes when assessing the source of information. This could aid identification and rejection of misinformation and result in an increased probability of rejecting misinformation as inconsistent with previous experience. The aim of the present study was to determine whether effects of perceptual load on eyewitness