Implication degree and delay on recall of events: An experimental and HDV study.

Abstract

This paper has done an experiment to test the effect of both retention (immediate vs. delayed one week) and implication degree (neutral vs. involved perspectives) over accuracy and quality of a complex event memory. 56 subjects witnessed a traffic accident adopting the role of either an observer or one of the actors involved in the accident. Subsequently they were asked to describe what happened either immediately or a week later. Several variables on recall were measured. All statistically significant variables were globally analyzed through High Dimensional Visualization (HDV). The results show that from the perspective of codification and taking into consideration the different degrees of involvement, the accuracy of the statements affects only in the immediate recovery since the subjects who encode the incident from the perspective of one of the players involved in the accident appear to ignore the less relevant information from their own perspective providing more specific and organized statements, although also more emotional and autobiographical and with most self-references and personal comments. The HDV graph representing all significant variables show a clear distinction of memories due to subjects perspective.

Keywords

• Memory
• Eyewitness testimony
• credibility
• Accuracy
• delay
• Vantage point
• High dimensional visualization
• Multidimensional scaling.