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Source : Science

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• Both experiments found that subjects who witnessed a criminal event and were tested about it immediately afterward were more susceptible to having misinformation -- or false information -- instilled in their later recall of the event than non-tested subjects. The researchers call that effect "retrieval-enhanced suggestibility," or RES.
• "There are many cases in which misinformation is introduced unknowingly to people," said Chan, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State. "It could be police, or through friends, or a number of sources. And people can confuse their memories, even if it's information not specifically pertaining to that witnessed case. For example, if you saw a bank robbery and later saw a movie depicting bank robberies, whatever you remember from that movie -- which has nothing to do with the real-life case -- can interfere with your ability to recall the real-life case.
• "So misinformation comes from all sorts of sources, especially nowadays with TV news reports trying to compete with people's accounts on Twitter with what they just saw,"
• All participants then listened to an eight-minute audio narrative that summarized the video and contained some misinformation about the crime they witnessed in the video. All the subjects returned a week later to take the same recall test. The researchers found that the tested subjects were more likely to recall the misinformation than the non-tested participants.
• "The most surprising finding from this line of research was that taking the immediate test, or initially recalling that event, somehow increased your susceptibility to misleading information later," Chan said. "That was definitely not expected. In fact, my collaborators and I expected the opposite based on what we know from the burgeoning cognitive psychology literature on the testing effect."
• In both experiments, the researchers also found that the subjects who were initially tested and not provided the misinformation recalled the event's details more accurately than the non-tested subjects one week later. So the initial test reinforced their memory of the event.
• "One really great thing about testing for memory is that not only does it enhance memory for the original information, it also lets you learn new information better,"
• "I think that because of all this new misinformation that's floating around, research in this area has even more real world relevance nowadays,"

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