Perfect Timothy J, Harris Lucy J
Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, England.
Mem Cognit. 2003 Jun;31(4):570-80. doi: 10.3758/bf03196098.
Eyewitnesses are known often to falsely identify a familiar but innocent bystander when asked to pick out a perpetrator from a lineup. Such unconscious transference errors have been attributed to either identity confusions at encoding or source retrieval errors. Three experiments contrasted younger and older adults in their susceptibility to such misidentifications. Participants saw photographs of perpetrators, then a series of mug shots of innocent bystanders. A week later, they saw lineups containing bystanders (and others containing perpetrators in Experiment 3) and were asked whether any of the perpetrators were present. When younger faces were used as stimuli (Experiments 1 and 3), older adults showed higher rates of transference errors. When older faces were used as stimuli (Experiments 2 and 3), no such age effects in rates of unconscious transference were apparent. In addition, older adults in Experiment 3 showed an own-age bias effect for correct identification of targets. Unconscious transference errors were found to be due to both source retrieval errors and identity confusions, but age-related increases were found only in the latter.
众所周知，当目击者被要求从一组人当中挑选出犯罪者时，他们常常会错误地指认一个熟悉但无辜的旁观者。这种无意识的转移错误被归因于编码时的身份混淆或源检索错误。三项实验对比了年轻人和老年人在遭受此类错误识别方面的易感性。参与者先看了犯罪者的照片，然后看了一系列无辜旁观者的面部照片。一周后，他们看到包含旁观者的列队辨认（在实验3中还有包含犯罪者的列队辨认），并被问及其中是否有任何犯罪者。当使用年轻面孔作为刺激物时（实验1和3），老年人表现出更高的转移错误率。当使用老年面孔作为刺激物时（实验2和3），无意识转移率方面没有明显的年龄效应。此外，实验3中的老年人在正确识别目标方面表现出了一种年龄偏好效应。研究发现，无意识转移错误是由源检索错误和身份混淆共同导致的，但与年龄相关的增加仅在后者中出现。
