( ecause older adults are more inclined t...)Older Adults May Be Unreliable Eyewitness, Study Shows,Health

ecause older adults are more inclined to miscombine details of events, which results in a high degree of confidence that they are remembering these details accurately.

Participants in the study were shown a five-minute video clip reenacting a burglary and police chase. They were then asked to answer 24 yes/no questions about what they had witnessed in the video. Eight of those questions referred to details that never actually happened in the video, such as suggesting the presence of a gun when in fact no gun ever appeared in the video itself.

Prior to completing the memory test, the participants were told that some of the test questions would refer to details that had not actually occurred in the video. They were asked to indicate for each test question whether it had occurred in the video only, in the questionnaire only, or neither. They were also asked to judge the likely accuracy of their response, essentially whether they were guessing or certain. It was here that the confidence level, even when wrong, was much higher among older adults than younger adults.

“This finding suggests that this is not simply a case of poorer memory among older adults, but that there may be some other mechanism leading to the high rate of confidence,” Dodson said. “We believe the high confidence comes from the detail that they believe they remember. Because the detail seems sharp, they are highly confident that they are correct in their recollection, even when the recollection has been suggested to them rather than actually witnessed. This pattern of behavior is particularly worrisome, given the influence of eyewitness confidence on jury decision making.”

The older study participants were 60 to 80 years of age, while the younger participants were college students. There were three study groups: the older participants who all took the questionnaire immediately after seeing the video, a young group who also took the questionnaire immediately
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