‘Tell me what just happened’: the effect of immediate recall on adult memory for instances of a repeated event

ABSTRACT

To reduce the memory decay associated with delayed reporting, witnesses are often encouraged to note down their recall immediately after the event. However, research has only investigated the benefits of immediate recall for single events; no research has explored whether immediate recall can improve memory for repeated events. Therefore, this research examined the effect of immediate recall on adult memory for a repeated event. In Experiment 1 (N = 42), participants watched four workplace bullying videos. After each video, the experimental group immediately recalled what occurred during the bullying instance, while the control group did not. One-week after the final video, all participants completed a final recall report about each video in the series. In Experiment 2 (N = 46), the same design and procedure were followed as Experiment 1, except prior to completing their final recall reports, all participants received correct and misleading post-event information about the third instance. The findings revealed that immediate recall enhanced memory accuracy across instances, but did not impact recall of source memory errors nor misinformation acceptance. The findings suggest that it may be beneficial for victims/witnesses of repeated offences, such as domestic abuse, to document their memories soon after experiencing an incident.

KEYWORDS:

• eyewitness memory
• repeated events
• immediate recall
• repeated abuse
• post-event information

Author note

Experiment 1 data was previously presented at the 2016 International Conference on Memory and the 2017 Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition Conference. Data for Experiment 1 and 2 are available upon request. Experimental materials supporting this research are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/2ua6w/?view_only=1e931cdab44349879f9ac6f091dcde95.

We are grateful to many volunteers from the University of Sydney Forensic Psychology Lab for their assistance with data collection and memory coding: Rhiannon Anscombe, Katherine Awford, Lily Baccon, Mia Kaminsky, Liza Legro, Sarah Li, Victoria Lim-Howe, Mariam Nagi Fam, Lauren Stavropoulos, and Alex Zappia.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A medium effect size was selected because at the time of designing and conducting this research (i.e., 2015-2016) there was no relevant experimental research on adult memory for repeated events to inform our power analysis. Therefore, we settled on powering the experiment to detect a medium effect size as this was regarded as most feasible given the laborious nature of studying memory for repeated events.

2 We acknowledge that there is extensive research examining children’s suggestibility for a repeated event (e.g., Connolly & Lindsay, 2001; Powell et al., 1999; Price & Connolly, 2004). However, this research will not be discussed, given the known differences in suggestibility between children and adults (Brainerd & Reyna, 2004; Roebers & Schneider, 2000).

3 For this series of analyses, it should be noted that a significant effect of instance was expected. This is because participants only received post-event information regarding the third instance that they viewed, and therefore acceptance of post-event information could only occur if the number of reported post-event information items was significantly higher for the instance order where participants were exposed to post-event information, as opposed to when not exposed to it (i.e., spontaneous reporting).