Time-of-day effects on eyewitness reports in morning and evening types

Abstract

Our performance varies throughout the day as a function of alignment with our circadian rhythms. The current experiment tested whether similar performance patterns can be observed in eyewitness memory performance. One-hundred-and-three morning-type and evening-type participants watched a stimulus event, provided a free report and answered cued questions in the morning and the evening hours, respectively. We expected eyewitness reports to be more detailed and more accurate at participants’ circadian peaks than at circadian troughs. Contrary to our predictions, time of testing did not significantly affect quantity and accuracy of eyewitness statements. Future studies might investigate whether matching chronotype with time of day would be beneficial when encoding or retrieval conditions are suboptimal or when eyewitnesses are vulnerable.

Keywords:

• body clock
• chronotype
• circadian rhythm
• cued recall
• eyewitness memory
• free recall
• synchrony effect
• time of day

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Sergii Yaremenko has declared no conflicts of interest

Melanie Sauerland has declared no conflicts of interest

Lorraine Hope has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Review Committee Psychology and Neuroscience of Maastricht University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marlot van Kempen and Anne Lausberg for their help in piloting the materials and collecting data. Open data and analytic code are available online at https://osf.io/5zvdp/?view_only=4fd8e48956564ca9a3b286263019fd72

Notes

1 We conducted the main analyses including only participants with originally suggested rMEQ scores and obtained analogous findings.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by a fellowship awarded from the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program The House of Legal Psychology with Framework Partnership Agreement 2013-0036 under Specific Grant Agreement 2016-1339 to Sergii Yaremenko.