This article summary is dedicated to the world's greatest living poet/songwriter, Robert Zimmerman and to the Y2K Summer Olympic Games.

Overview:
This article concerns the factors that underlie the misinformation effect in children. The misinformation paradigm is a three stage procedure developed by Loftus in the 1970's.

• The subject witnesses some event through videotape, slides or staged live (e.g. Kids hear a story where Lauren eats eggs for breakfast)
• Later subjects are provided with postevent information that is either neutral (e.g. Did Lauren eat all of her breakfast before going out to play?) or misleading (e.g. Did Lauren eat all of her cereal before going out to play?).
• Later subjects are tested for their memory for the original event (e.g. Did Lauren eat eggs or cereal for breakfast?)

Theoretical Accounts of the Misinformation Effect

Four broad accounts of the misinformation effect can be disintiguished....

• Storeage Accounts: Postevent information alters the existing memory trace in storage either by overwriting the original trace or by blending with the original trace
• Retrieval Accounts: Postevent information interferes with the retrieval of the original memory trace.
• Source Monitoring Accounts: Both the original memory trace and the postevent information may be retrieved but it may be difficult for participants to distinguish them from each other.
• Pragmatic Account: The participant accurately remembers the source of the postevent information but decides to accept the misinformation because of the source's credibility.

[[Jim's note: Social factors could presumably operate at storage as well as at retrieval as we argued in Lampinen & Smith (1995).   Holliday and Hayes are concentrating on pragmatic factors operating when evluating information at retreival]]

To distinguish amongst these accounts Holliday and Hayes suggest using the Process Dissociation Procedure.  The process dissociation procedure is a way of estimating the relative contribution of conscious recollection of and familiarity to memory judgments.

In the process dissociation procedure participants are given one of two sets of instructions.

• Inclusion Instructions: If you recognize the information from the original event or from the postevent information then select it.  They're called inclusion instructions because participants are asked to include the postevent information.
• Exclusion Instructions: If you recognize the information from the orginal event select it, but do not select anything that was in the postevent information.

• When you are only responding based on familiarity you cannot choose to respond differently based on the instructions.  Afterall, you don't know where you encountered the information only that you encountered it.
• When you are responding based on recollection, you can choose to respond differently based on the instructions.  If you consciously recollect that it was in the postevent information you can reject it under exclusion instructions and accept it under inclusions instructions.

The Process Dissociation Procedure assumes that recollection and familiarity are statistically independent and that the probability of recollection and familiarity are not influenced by which instructions are read.  Here's the logic behind the Process Dissociation Procedure...

So it's possible by making some assumptions and doing a little math to estimate recollection and familiarity by using the process dissociation procedure.  The pragmatics at retrieval account would predict that virtually all of the effect is due to recollection. The memory based accounts would argue that virtually all of the effect is due to familiarity.  Let's see who's right.
 

Method: The children were read a story with accompanying pictures. Two days later they were read some pieces of misleading information and generated other pieces of misleading information.

Read: "Billy was eating cereal with Miss Peabody when he noticed she looked like a witch."
Generate: "Billy was eating  [stop] This is what you put milk on and eat for breakfast, it starts with c..."

Results
 

Experiment 1	Recollection 5 y/o	Recollection 8 y/o	Familiarity 5 y/o	Familiarity 8 y/o
Read	.09	-.01	.49	.45
Generate	.21	.23	.54	.44

 

Experiment 2	Recollection 5 y/o	Recollection 8 y/o	Familiarity 5 y/o	Familiarity 8 y/o
Read	-.01	-.02	.50	.48
Generate	.18	.19	.55	.50

 

The clear result seems to be that under the standard conditions (i.e. the read conditions) the misinformation acceptance that occurs is familiarity based.

Under the generate conditions there is much more explicit recolleciton of the misinformation.

They argue that misinformation acceptance can be governed by both conscious recollection and familiarity.

They argue that there is some trend towards less of a contribution of familiarity with age.  This finding is the opposite of what Lindsay found in a similar experiment.

Lastly they argue that these findings are more consistent with memory based than pragmatic (at retrieval) accounts of misinformation acceptance.