Misleading Postevent Information and Recall of the Original Event: Further Evidence Against the Memory Impairment Hypothesis

This study evaluates the hypothesis that misleading postevent information impairs memory for the original event. Subjects viewed a sequence of slides depicting an event, read a postevent narrative that presented neutral or misleading information about critical details, and then were tested on their ability to recall the critical details. In two experiments no difference in recall performance between misled and control conditions was found. These results, in conjunction with the McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985a) finding that misleading information did not affect subjects' ability to recognize original information, argue strongly against the memory impairment hypothesis.