Recollections of a robbery: Effects of arousal and alcohol upon recall and person identification.

Abstract

One week after committing a simulated robbery while intoxicated or sober, each of 142 subjects recalled the event within a “cognitive interview”. In an initial exploratory experiment, alcohol consumption reduced the accuracy of recall of a variety of types of information, in particular, information about persons. In the second experiment, person identification suffered following the consumption of alcohol, but only when arousal was low. Higher levels of arousal appeared instead to minimize the negative impact of alcohol upon encoding and recall. Second, whereas the recollections by subjects of what they saw during the crime were not impaired by alcohol consumption, their recollections of what they did were impaired. Both experiments examined the effects of arousal upon the subjects' recalls, and Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that increased arousal serves to reduce attention to peripheral sources of information. This hypothesis was supported because the identification of persons central to the crime benefited from increased arousal but the identification of persons peripheral to the crime did not. A similar hypothesis about the effects of alcohol received only mixed support because the subjects' behaviors reflected “alcohol myopia” but their identifications of target persons did not. Finally, manipulations at the time of retrieval of the subjects' beliefs about how much alcohol had been consumed also altered accuracy of recall.