"I have no memory of that": Perpetrators' Memory for Their Own Crimes (Post 5)

Eyewitness memory has been an immensely fruitful research area in cognitive psychology - but eyewitnesses are not the only ones present during a crime. In fact, perpetrators' memory for their own crimes has been a largely ignored subject of research, even though the veracity of confessions is a rather contentious topic in many court situations.

There are many factors that may affect the accuracy of recall for the details of a crime - arousal, centrality of particular details to the crime (e.g. the box that money was taken from versus a jacket that was hanging nearby), gender of the perpetrator or witness, and consistency versus inconsistency of the crime with existing schemata.

Participants were instructed to carry out a mock theft of an exam from a professor's office. Arousal was manipulated rather excitingly by telling half of the participants that they would have to dodge security on the way! A week after the theft, memory for the crime was tested through free recall, a present/absent recognition task for objects in the professor's office, and a forced-choice recognition test for pictures of the office and the route the participants took.

Females recognized more objects than males at low arousal, but not at high arousal; males tended to make more hits than correct rejections in the recognition task; schema-consistent or central objects were remembered better; and recognition memory was generally better in the high-arousal condition.