Does experiencing inattentional blindness for crime influence eyewitness recall?

ABSTRACT

Witnesses may not notice crimes occurring when their attention is elsewhere, which may affect their memory. In this study, 174 participants completed an attention-demanding task while viewing a video containing an assault. Whether participants noticed the assault or experienced inattentional blindness for it was assessed. Then, participants were exposed to post-event information (containing misinformation) before completing a cued-recall task under one of three recall instructions (free, forced, or no instruction). Most participants experienced inattentional blindness for the assault (65.5%), which had a negative effect on recall, regardless of recall instruction. Specifically, participants who experienced inattentional blindness were less confident, complete, and accurate, and were more likely to report misinformation, than participants who noticed the crime. Witnesses who experienced inattentional blindness reported that they relied purely on post-event information to answer some questions. The findings suggest that caution should be taken when interviewing witnesses who have not paid attention to a crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Eyewitness memory
• inattentional blindness
• misinformation
• recall

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Thomas Harmon for assistance with coding the memory reports, Dr Dan Costa for providing statistical advice, and Professor Ira Hyman and Dr Ciara Greene for providing constructive reviews on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The current project has been pre-registered, and the materials and dataset have been made open access. The pre-registration, data, and materials are available at https://osf.io/be5an/.

Notes

1 As part of our pre-registration, we reported that we would also look at precision of memory. However, inter-rater reliability between two coders was low on precision measures. As a result, we decided not to include any measures of precision of responses as we could not be confident that the precision coding was reliable. The difficulty in distinguishing between fine- and coarse-grained information has been reported elsewhere (see Brewer et al., 2018).

2 We had planned to run this study face-to-face, so that the interviewer could ask the appropriate follow-up question based on the participant’s cued-recall response. When adapting the study to an online format due to COVID-19, this was not possible. Therefore, getting participants to select whether they had provided a valid response when reviewing their response seemed the best option. However, it should be noted that some participants inaccurately classified some of their responses as valid or invalid, which affected their follow-up response.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.