Misinformation effect

The misinformation effect happens when a person's recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event information. For example, in a study published in 1994, subjects were initially shown one of two different series of slides that depicted a college student at the university bookstore, with different objects of the same type changed in some slides. One version of the slides would, for example, show a screwdriver while the other would show a wrench, and the audio narrative accompanying the slides would only refer to the object as a "tool". In the second phase, subjects would read a narrative description of the events in the slides, except this time a specific tool was named, which would be the incorrect tool half the time. Finally, in the third phase, subjects had to list five examples of specific types of objects, such as tools, but were told to only list examples which they had not seen in the slides. Subjects who had read an incorrect narrative were far less likely to list the written object (which they hadn't actually seen) than the control subjects (28% vs. 43%), and were far more likely to incorrectly list the item which they had actually seen (33% vs. 26%).