Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
Empirical ArticleCredibility and Event Frequency: Assessing the Credibility of Adults Who Recall a Repeated Event Using Reality Monitoring
Section snippets
Experiment 1
Consistent with Reality Monitoring literature, it was predicted that relative to event-fabricators single-event truth-tellers would report more Reality Monitoring details, except for cognitive operations, and that Reality Monitoring would effectively discriminate veracity amongst single-event participants and fabricators. Conversely, we expected repeated-event participants to rely upon their general representation of the event, and report fewer details about a specific episode. Thus, we
Experiment 2
In Experiment 2, participants observed or imagined a video of domestic violence, on one or multiple occasions. In Experiment 1, Reality Monitoring could not discriminate repeated-event truth-tellers and liars who had fabricated the event once. Because repeated imagination can facilitate the generation of detail-rich accounts, we expected Reality Monitoring criteria to classify veracity amongst repeated-event speakers in Experiment 2, but in the opposite direction predicted by Reality Monitoring
General Discussion
We conducted two experiments examining the effect of event frequency upon adults’ Reality Monitoring scores. In both experiments, Reality Monitoring reliably classified single-event truth-tellers and liars but not repeated-event truth-tellers and liars. These results suggest that repeated experience negatively affects the presence of sensory and contextual details in one's account. When individuals experience an event that primarily consists of details that differ predictably across episodes,
Author Contributions
The experiments reported here were conducted by S.D. for her doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of H.P.. S.D. conceptualised the research questions and experimental design, with input from H.P.. S.D. created the research materials which were reviewed by H.P.. S.D. managed the data collection process and analysed the data. H.P. consulted and provided feedback on the statistical analyses and data presentation. S.D. wrote the primary manuscript drafts and made major contributions to
Conflict of Interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
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