Incidental learning of proper names and “earwitness” recall

ABSTRACT

This study tested recall of proper names versus other details of a crime in incidental learning conditions designed to parallel recall when an “earwitness” reports what he or she overheard from someone discussing a crime. Participants heard an audio recording of someone discussing details of a crime he had committed, and they then completed filler tasks designed to mislead them as to the study’s true purpose. After this short delay, participants had particularly poor recall for names in association with roles in the crime compared to other details about the crime. Their name errors sometimes implicated innocent people, a disturbing finding given the potential ramifications for people incriminated by witnesses reporting hearsay. Somewhat reassuringly, participants frequently did not provide a guess for the name when they were uncertain about who did what, and they reported reduced confidence in their name recall, with particularly low confidence when they recalled incorrect name information. Findings establish the pronounced difficulty of proper name learning in incidental learning conditions, and results suggest that earwitness testimony involving name recall should be treated with particular caution.

KEYWORDS:

• Proper names
• name learning
• incidental learning
• earwitness recall
• confidence

Acknowledgement

We thank Austin Bowman for his acting in the audio recording.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A different use of the term “earwitness” involves identification of speakers by their voices (e.g., Yarmey, 2007), which was not tested in the present study.

2 There is much existing research about the relationship between confidence and accuracy in witness memory (e.g., Wixted & Wells, 2017). The present research is not focused on testing that relationship in general, so our predictions about confidence in memory for names versus non-name details are based on Tauber and Rhodes (2010), whose study directly tested participants’ confidence in their memory for names.