News Release

Eyewitness Memory: Remembering Similar Events Induces Forgetting

You're stopped at a traffic light. The intersecting lane of traffic slows to a stop as yellow changes to red. Your light signals and as the SUV ahead of you moves through the intersection it is suddenly struck by an impatient coupe careening through its red light; and just as quickly speeds away. You sympathetically pull to the side to offer your account on the hit-and-run. You remember a friend's car accident last week. It's only natural that one accident would remind you of another, but in making that connection, you're also experiencing a loss of memory.

Research conducted by Karl-Heinz Bauml of the Universitat Regensburg in Germany, showed that forgetting occurs simply by thinking of related items or episodes. These results suggest that details of eyewitness memory for an event can erode through simple recall of another similar event from memory.

These findings were reported in the July 2002 issue of the American Psychological Society journal Psychological Science.

"Eyewitness memory for specific details of an observed accident or crime may be impaired by generating related semantic knowledge," Bauml said. "If semantic generation is sufficient to cause retrieval induced forgetting, memory for an event might be impaired simply by generating general knowledge associated with cues related to the event, even if that knowledge was acquired in a quite different context."

In Phase 1 of the study, 104 individually tested psychology students learned a list of items. The lists included such items as types of trees and four-legged animals. In Phase 2, participants were either asked to generate from memory items that related to those of the initial item list, or were presented with related items for study. The participants were then asked to recall the original item list.

Comparing the results from the two groups, it appeared that participants who had been asked to generate the list of related items performed significantly less well in recalling items on the original list, compared to the performance of participants who were presented with a list of related items.

Bauml suggests that because the actual generation of related items from memory induced forgetting and the presentation of items for study did not, the generation process caused the forgetting.

The complete text of this and other articles from Psychological Science are available online in the APS Media Center at www.psychologicalscience.org/media. For more information about this article, contact Bauml at karl-heinz@psychologie.uniregensburg.de.

Psychological Science ranks in the top 10 of psychology journals for impact on the field by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society represents scientific psychology, promoting the "giving away" of psychology in the public interest. For more information on the journal Psychological Science or the science of psychology, visit the APS web site at www.psychologicalscience.org.

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