ABSTRACT

Loftus and her associates (Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982; Loftus & Palmer, 1974) repeatedly demonstrated a misinformation effect. The procedure that has been most frequently employed, the standard or original procedure, involves three phases. In the first phase subjects witness an event, which may be staged or presented via a film or slide sequence. For example, Loftus, Miller, and Burns (978) asked subjects to watch a film of an accident in which a car runs a stop sign. During the second phase the subjects in the control condition are exposed to neutral information about a critical item. In this type of design (between-subjects) the subjects do not serve as their own controls. In contrast, subjects in the misled condition receive misleading or biased information about critical items. Loftus et a1. (978) told these subjects that the driver had passed through a yield sign. Stage three occurs at some later time when subjects in both conditions are asked, in the form of a forced-choice recognition test, to decide whether the initial sequence of events contained the misleading or original information (i.e., stop sign

vs. yield sign in the present example). Researchers who have employed this design have found the misinformation effect with adults (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978) and with children (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia , 1987; Toglia, Ross, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1992).