impression-formation advantage in memory for faces: when eyewitnesses are interested in...

European Journal of Social Psychology

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 793–807 (2009)

Published online 31 December 2008 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.581

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Impression-formation advantage in memory for faces: When eyewitnessesare interested in targets’ likeability, rather than their identity

Correspondence to: Klaus Fiedler, Psychologi-mail: [email protected]

opyright # 2008 John Wiley & Son

KLAUS FIEDLER*, KATHARINA KACZOR,SORAYA HAARMANN, MARTIN STEGMULLERAND JULIA MALONEYUniversity of Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract

The advantage in person memory of impression formation over memory task instructions is shown to extend to the

eyewitness identification paradigm. Instructions to form an impression of target persons led to more accurate

identifications in subsequent photo line-ups than explicit instructions to memorize the targets (Experiment 1). Prior

knowledge that a crime was going on did not affect performance. Two confounded components of the successful instruction

condition were decomposed in Experiment 2, showing that the enhanced performance is due to the impression task proper,

rather than the absence of explicit memory instructions. Analyses of hits and false alarms revealed that the positive

influence of impression formation on discrimination performance was due to a genuine enhancement in discrimination

ability rather than merely a shift toward a stricter response criterion. Experiment 3 provided some evidence to suggest that

eyewitness performance can even be influenced by recontextualization efforts and impression judgments at the time of

retrieval. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The eyewitness identification paradigm (Wells & Loftus, 2003; Wells & Olsen, 2003) represents a real-world analog of a

recognition test. Witnesses of a crime or accident are presented with a line-up of persons or photographs and asked to

identify the target persons involved in an originally witnessed episode. To study witnesses’ performance, therefore, the

same analytical tools can be used that have become scientific standard in the analysis of other multiple-choice recognition

tests. A major pragmatic difference, though, lies in the consequences of accurate memory. Depending on whether an

identification decision is correct or incorrect, a real perpetrator can be punished and prevented from causing further harm,

an actually guilty perpetrator may be released erroneously, an innocent person may be sent to jail, or the innocence of a

suspect may be proven. In signal-detection and related analyses (Green & Swets, 1966; Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988; Swets,

Dawes, &Monahan, 2000), these four outcomes are commonly referred to as hit, false negative, false positive, and correct

rejection, respectively.

Incorrect identifications, or false positives, have been shown to represent the major cause for justice errors leading to the

imprisonment of innocent people (Deffenbacher, Bornstein, Penrod, & McGorty, 2004; Wells, Malpass, Lindsay, Fisher,

Turtle, & Fulero, 2000). Eyewitnesses exhibit a leniency bias, that is, a response tendency toward positive identification

decisions, regardless of whether the suspect is identical to the original target or not, causing many hits (correct

identifications) but also many false alarms (incorrect identifications of innocent suspects). This bias toward too many false

positives (Malpass & Devine, 1981; Wells & Olsen, 2003) is particularly high when instructions do not state explicitly that

the original perpetrator may be missing in the panel, and when the line-up is presented simultaneously rather than

successively (Steblay, Dysart, & Fulero, 2001; Wells et al., 2000).

sches Institut, Universitat Heidelberg, Hauptstrasse 47-51, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany.

s, Ltd.

Received 1 February 2008

Accepted 5 September 2008

794 Klaus Fiedler et al.

Recently, remarkable improvements have been made in the methodology of eyewitness memory research, leading to a

successful collaboration with lawyers and the police (Sporer, 2001; Tredoux, 1998; Wells et al., 2000). Researchers have

identified several influences on memory that moderate eyewitness performance, such as the time interval between the

original episode and the recognition test (Behrman & Davey, 2001; Finger & Pezdek, 1999), the feedback given to a

witness by an interviewer (Wells & Bradfield, 1998), the witness’ positive versus negative mood state (Forgas, Laham, &

Vargas, 2005), or the racial or ethnic relation between the witness and the identification target (Sporer, 2001).

Particularly relevant to the present research are studies addressing the impact of encoding tasks, that is, of the witness’

mental activity during the original observation (Deffenbacher, Leu, & Brown, 1981; Devine & Malpass, 1985; Sporer,

1991; Sporer, Malpass, & Koehnken, 1996). Since the advent of the levels-of-processing approach (Bower &Karlin, 1974;

Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975), encoding influences are commonly considered the key to memory

performance (Leippe, Wells, & Ostrom, 1978; Maass & Brigham, 1982; Sporer et al., 1996). Applying the processing-

depth notion to face recognition, it has been predicted and confirmed that deep and wholistic encoding enhances the

recognition performance in the eyewitness task (Devine & Malpass, 1985; Jenkins, Lavie, & Driver, 2005; Olsson &

Juslin, 1999; Mueller &Wherry, 1980; Shapiro & Penrod, 1986; Sporer, 1991; Strnad &Mueller, 1977; Winograd, 1981).

However, in spite of this intensive work on encoding influences, fundamental research on face recognition in general and

applied research on eyewitness memory in particular have largely ignored a most intriguing and prominent phenomenon

from the social-cognition approach to person memory. This phenomenon is the focus of the present study.

EYEWITNESS MEMORY AND ENCODING TASKS: IMPRESSION FORMATION VERSUS EXPLICIT

MEMORY SET

Many person memory studies converge in demonstrating that memory for individual persons’ traits or behaviors improves

after impression-formation instructions, as compared with explicit memory instructions (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996;

Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980). Thus, when participants do not expect a memory test but try to form an impression of the

target persons during encoding, a subsequent surprise memory test will produce better performance than intentional

encoding attempts to memorize the stimuli as accurately as possible.

Despite the prominence of this counter-intuitive finding in social psychology, its practical implications, and its face

validity, for eyewitness research was hardly examined systematically (cf.Wells & Loftus, 2003), although there are good

reasons to suggest that the phenomenon generalizes to memory for faces. Inspired by the same depth-of-processing

conception as the social psychologists concerned with the impression-formation advantage, Bower and Karlin (1974) had

already found in an early study that judging faces for likeability is an optimal encoding strategy. This seminal finding was

replicated and extended subsequently (Winograd, 1981). In modern research and theorizing on face recognition, the

facilitative influence of trait encoding and affective evaluations is considered a well-established law (Burton, Bruce, &

Hancock, 1999, 2007; Sporer, 1991; Sporer et al., 1996).

The independent variable, impression formation versus intentional memory, refers to the witness’ learning ecology

rather than the specific cognitive mediators that are the focus of the extant literature on face recognition (Baudouin &

Tiberghien, 2002; Burton et al., 1999, 2007; Courtois & Mueller, 1979; Patterson & Baddeley, 1977). These existing

approaches are concerned with the role of multiple distinctive features (Courtois & Mueller, 1979), configural

representations (McKelvie, 1995), perceptual and cognitive factors (Burton et al., 1999), prototypical representation of

faces in memory (Cabeza, Bruce, Cabo, & Oda, 1999) or whether sex and familiarity of faces are represented separably or

integrally (Baudouin & Tiberghien, 2002). However, these cognitive mediators are conceptually orthogonal to what the

witness was doing during encoding; it is an open empirical question how these cognitive-process variables are affected by

impression formation or memory encoding sets.

Moreover, most previous studies were not embedded in an eyewitness task context, which is distinct from an ordinary

recognition experiment because the target persons are originally observed in a completely different format and context

than in the subsequent memory test. Encoding manipulations involved explicit trait judgments rather than merely asking

subjects to somehow form an impression or to memorize the stimulus information. The latter manipulation is much more

abstract and more representative of eyewitnesses’ real encoding activity, which hardly ever entails specific trait judgments.

Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 793–807 (2009)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Impression formation and memory for faces 795

Thus, while the impression formation versus memory manipulation has face validity for applied settings, it lies outside the

immediate domain of theoretical models of the cognitive underpinnings of face recognition.

Practical Implications

The hypothesized influence of witnesses’ affective impression judgments during encoding has obvious practical

implications. Imagine the following courtroom scenario: a judge wants to evaluate the validity of an eyewitness’

identification decision, asking the witness what she was doing and attending to while observing the scene. She reveals

frankly that she was thinking about dating someone tonight and so she was mainly concerned with the people’s

attractiveness. This greatly reduces the judge’s confidence in the witness, and the court does not follow her testimony,

making a wrong decision, even though the witness’ encoding mindset was optimal for subsequent recognition.

Theoretical Explanation

Apart from its practical significance in legal settings, research on the impression-formation advantage is also of theoretical

importance as it can further our understanding of eyewitness-memory in particular and of face-memory performance in

general. One open theoretical question, to start with, arises from the confound of two components of the traditional

encoding set manipulation. One experimental condition is defined by the presence of an impression-formation task and the

absence of memory instructions; in the other condition an impression task is absent and memory instructions are present.

The question is whether the superiority of the first condition reflects a facilitative effect of impression formation or an

inhibitory effect of intentional memory.

By disentangling these two factors in the present research, we expect to find a genuine impression-formation advantage,

in accordance with the processing-depth framework. Assuming that forming an integral person impression involves deep

elaboration during encoding (Bargh & Thein, 1985; Macrae, Hewstone, & Griffith, 1993), the resulting memory strength

should causally reflect this facilitative effect of the impression-formation task. It is hardly apparent how the confounded

component, absence of explicit memory instructions, might induce a strong memory code in the present task context, even

though the absence of memory instructions was shown to increase other memory functions, such as rule or grammar

learning (Reber, 1993; Seger, 1994). In face recognition, though, we expect that the impression task per se causes

enhanced memory performance, in accordance with pertinent models of Baudouin, Gilibert, Sansone, and Tiberghien

(2000) or Bruce, Burton, and Hancock (2007).

Granting that impression formation causes enhanced performance, the next theoretical question is whether this reflects

a genuine increase in the witness’ ability to discriminate between faces represented in memory or merely a shift toward a

stricter response criterion. Witnesses often exhibit a liberal response bias, being too quick and uncritical in identifying a

suspect who may in fact not be the original target. This major source of error suggests that eyewitness performance could

be improved by simply inducing a stricter, more conservative or cautious response criterion. And indeed, a number of

factors that influence eyewitnesses (e.g., recognition instructions, panel composition; cf. Wells & Olsen, 2003) can only

affect the witness’ judgment strategy rather than the memory representation itself. Face recognition responses in general

were also shown depend on affective cues at the time of retrieval (T. Garcia-Marques, Mackie, Claypool, & L. Garcia-

Marques, 2004). Such affective cues could only impact retrieval or decision processes rather than the original memory

representation.

Thus, it is possible that the impression-formation advantage reflects a more cautious, less error-prone response

criterion. Independent of the discriminability of memory representations, forming an impression of a target may

strengthen the entitativity (Campbell, 1958) of that target, reducing the likelihood that other persons and faces are

classified as identical to that individualized target. Having represented a target as somebody I like (or I hate) may decrease

the likelihood that I see others similar enough to identify them with that target.

However, while such a criterion shift would seem plausible, the processing-depth account implies that the enhanced

performance resulting from an impression task cannot be due to a response strategy alone. Deep encoding should

strengthen the resulting memory code per se, creating a genuine memory advantage. This prediction is consistent with the

contention that impression judgments may increase the familiarity of targets and the associative links to known faces in


DOI: 10.1002/ejsp


memory (cf. Bruce, Henderson, Greenwood, Hancock, Burton, & Miller, 1999; Bruce et al., 2007). Moreover, forming an

evaluative impression can be considered a self-referent encoding task. Self-reference is well known as an effective

mnemonic strategy, which connects the stimuli to the self as a powerful knowledge structure (Greenwald & Banaji, 1989),

creating intra-item associations as well as inter-item associations (Klein & Loftus, 1988), and affective reactions (Blaney,

1986).

Signal-Detection Analysis

In any case, whether the superiority of impression-formation over explicit memory instruction reflects a genuine

difference in memory strength or just a change in response bias is of great theoretical interest. Signal-detection analysis

(Green & Swets, 1966) affords a suitable methodological tool for isolating these two performance aspects. Unfortunately,

this methodology was hardly ever applied to the impression-formation advantage, because almost all prior research on

person memory for traits and behaviors relied on free recall rather than recognition. By transferring the phenomenon to

face recognition, we can provide a straightforward empirical answer to this intriguing question.

Plan of the Present Research

Accordingly, the plan of the present investigation can be summarized as follows. Experiment 1 provides a straightforward

test of the advantage of impression formation over memory instructions in the eyewitness identification paradigm. In

addition to this major encoding manipulation, we include a second encoding factor, awareness of crime. Whether

participants know at the time of encoding that a crime is going on, is varied orthogonally to the basic instructional sets.

Analyzing hit and false-alarm rates in a signal-detection framework, we decompose the predicted impression-formation

advantage into sensitivity and bias effects.

In Experiment 2, the superior encoding condition, which confounds the presence of an impression task with the absence

of a memory task, is compared with two other conditions, in which either the impression instruction is removed or the

memory instruction is added. These two comparisons should indicate the origin of the encoding effect, either a genuine

impression-formation advantage or a disadvantage of intentional memory (Reber, 1993; Seger, 1994).

Finally, the findings obtained in the first two experiments lead us in Experiment 3 to tackle the possibility that mental

operations and impressions formed immediately before the recognition task may also affect the performance. This should

have obvious theoretical as well as practical implications for the instruction and interrogation of eyewitnesses prior to the

line-up.

EXPERIMENT 1

Using a synthetically composed slide show depicting various people moving in a public environment, it was possible to

exert experimental control over the original stimulus information, the presentation format, and the exposure duration.

Encoding instructions were manipulated prior to exposure. The appearance of several target persons in the original scene

allowed for several recognition tests to increase the overall statistical power. Although such a multiple recognition test is

not representative of legal practice, our main concern was with statistical power and internal rather than external validity.

Method

Participants, Design, and Overview

Eighty participants (40 males and 40 females) were randomly assigned (constrained to equal n and equal sex distribution)

to four groups resulting from the crossing of two factors, encoding task (impression vs. memory)� crime knowledge

(a priori vs. a posteriori). Before watching a slide show depicting four target persons participants received either


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impression formation or memory instructions. Either before (Prior Condition) or after encoding (Posterior) they were

informed that the slide show related to a crime. The recognition task consisted of eight line-ups, four of which included an

original target while the remaining four did not include an original person. Different indicators of memory performance—

derived from hit and false-alarm rates—were treated as repeated measures.

Materials

The original stimulus series consisted of 40 slides depicting four target persons (two males and two females between 20

and 30 years) appearing rapidly on a computer screen at a rate of one slide per second. Although static photos were used,

their sequence clearly conveyed that all four persons were rushing out of a building and entering a car. Slides showed all

targets in varying formats, covering single targets or pairs, portrait format or the entire person against the environmental

background, under the constraint that each person appeared on 14 slides and a full-screen photo of each individual’s face

was presented exactly once. An attempt was made that all four targets be roughly equally likely to be encoded. Note that

the rationale of the study did not depend on perfect equivalence, for we were interested in relative memory performance as

a function of encoding conditions, rather than absolute memory for individual targets.

For each target person, four different versions of five-person photo line-ups were constructed, such that targets appeared

in four different positions; each version included four different same-sex filler persons. The five photos of each line-up

were arranged horizontally and only showed faces, in a format different from the original slide show. In two versions, all

filler persons were selected to be relatively similar to the target, according to the authors’ consensual judgment. In the

remaining two versions, two fillers were similar whereas the other two were chosen to be dissimilar. A pilot study

confirmed that the 16 faces supposed to be similar to the suspect were actually rated more similar than the 16 faces

supposed to be dissimilar (M¼ 2.42 vs. 1.94), t(30)¼ 3.94, p< .001.

For each target line-up, a parallel version was constructed, in which the target was replaced by a distracter not included

in the original stimulus information. Using the same panel twice, with and without the targets person, is uncommon in

legal studies, because fillers are normally selected to resemble the perpetrator rather than an innocent distracter (Clark &

Tunnicliff, 2001). However, in the present research, our primary goal was not to simulate real courtroom conditions but to

reduce the noise of incomparable line-ups and to increase the statistical power by including multiple line-ups. Given

several original targets to be identified, the presentation of several line-ups and the repetition of a few fillers could hardly

confuse participants. The first identification response hardly constrained the response to the second line-up with the same

fillers.

Thus, each participant’s recognition task included eight line-ups, involving four target persons, two embedded among

similar fillers, and two among mixed (two similar, two dissimilar) fillers, plus four distracters line-ups within the same

filler persons. Allocating the target and distractor persons to the line-up versions followed a Latin square, which

guaranteed that across all participants in each experimental condition each target/distracter appeared about equally often

within each line-up version. Two presentation orders were used for the line-ups, under the constraints that panels with

targets or distracters, and with male and female targets/distracters, were alternating and that panels using the same fillers

did not appear in adjacent positions.

Procedure

Participants were received individually. The general part of the written instructions merely mentioned that participants

would be shown a series of pictures about which they would later have to answer several questions. They were asked to

read the instructions carefully. The specific part of the instructions differed between experimental groups:

Impression/Posterior Crime Knowledge: ‘‘This experiment is concerned with social impression formation. Across a

series of slides you will see several people leaving a building and disappearing in a car. Please try to form a vivid

impression of the persons that can be seen.’’

Impression/Prior Crime Knowledge: ‘‘This experiment is concerned with social impression formation. Across a series

of slides you will see an escape scene after a crime. Please try to form a vivid impression of the persons that can be seen.’’


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Figure 1. Mean identification rates (for Hits, FASusp, and FAFill) as a function of encoding instructions (memory vs. impressionformation) and time of crime information (posterior vs. prior) in Experiment 1


Memory/Posterior Crime Knowledge: ‘‘This experiment is concerned with memory performance. Across a series of

slides you will see several people leaving a building and disappearing in a car. Please try to memorize the persons that can

be seen as clearly as possible. You will finally be presented a memory test.’’

Memory/Prior Crime Knowledge: ‘‘This experiment is concerned with memory performance. Across a series of slides

you will see an escape scene after a crime. Please try to memorize the persons that can be seen as clearly as possible. You

will finally be presented a memory test.’’

A notebook served to present the slide show, after which participants filled in a short version of Kruglanski and

Webster’s (1996) need for closure (NFC) scale, comprising the 10 items that discriminate most effectively between high

versus low NFC people.1 The purpose here was not merely to fill a delay but also to assess a personality trait that may

reasonably correlate with a liberal response bias on eyewitness identification tasks. On the first page of a recognition

booklet, the line-up instructions asked participants to identify no more than one person, provided they recognized a target.

Each photo line-up was arranged horizontally on a separate page. Finally, participants were thoroughly debriefed and

thanked for their participation.

Results and Discussion

Two types of false alarms have to be distinguished: FASusp reflecting erroneous identifications of a ‘‘suspect’’ in a panel

that does not include an original target at all, and FAFill, resulting from erroneous identifications of a filler person in a panel

that does contain an original target. Legally, FASusp can lead to an innocent suspect’s condemnation, whereas FAFill has

little consequence. Theoretically, both FASusp and FAFill should be sensitive to response biases resulting from a lenient

criterion. FAFill is particularly diagnostic of a bias to identify one of the presently given faces in the line-up. FAFill should

be clearly higher than FASusp, because there are more fillers than innocent suspects.

Figure 1 provides mean proportions of hits and both measures of false alarms as a function of conditions; Table 1 gives

the corresponding numerical values. A comparison of the filled black bars (for hits) with the shaded and unfilled bars

in Figure 1 (for false alarms) affords a natural measure of accuracy. The superiority of the impression-formation condition

over the explicit memory condition is easily apparent, both in terms of higher hit rates (.56 vs. .39 for impression formation

and explicit memory, respectively) and lower false-alarm rates of the FAFill type (.14 vs. .29). No difference was obtained

in false alarms of the FASusp type (.06 vs. .07).

The other independent variable, crime awareness, did not have any visible influence on recognition performance (cf.

Figure 1). Thus, the superiority of an impression-formation set is independent of whether the witnesses believe a crime is

going on or not.

1The selection of these items was based on personal communication with Arie Kruglanski and Antonio Pierro.


DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Table 1. Average measures of recognition performance in Experiment 1 as a function of experimental conditions: memory versusimpression formation and crime reference posterior versus prior

Dependent measure

Experimental conditions

Memoryposterior

Memoryprior

Impressionposterior

Impressionprior

Memorytotal

Impressiontotal

p(Hit) .38 .40 .50 .61 .39 .56p(FASusp) .05 .06 .09 .05 .06 .07p(FAFill) .33 .25 .15 .14 .29 .14p(Hit)� p(FASusp) (sensitivity) .33 .34 .41 .56 .33 .49p(Hit)� p(FAFill) (sensitivity) .05 .15 .35 .48 .10 .42BiasSusp .15 .13 .16 .24 .14 .20BiasFill .35 .26 .20 .35 .31 .28


For a test of significance, two analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted. The first ANOVA included p(Hits)

versus p(FASusp) as a repeated-measures factor (denoted accuracy) along with encoding set (impression vs. memory) and

crime reference (a priori vs. a posteriori) as between-subjects factors. A strong accuracy main effect was obtained,

F(1,76)¼ 155.19, p< .001, due to more hits than false alarms of the FASusp type. This main effect was moderated by an

accuracy� encoding task interaction, F(1,76)¼ 5.65, p< .01, which reflects the impression-formation advantage. An

encoding task main effect, F(1,76)¼ 6.78, p< .05, indicates slightly lower absolute identification rates after impression

formation than memory instructions. Neither the main effect nor any interaction involving the crime reference factor

approached significance (all Fs< 1.6).

A parallel ANOVA based on false alarms of the FAFill type, defining accuracy by the comparison of p(Hits) versus

p(FAFill), also yielded an accuracy main effect, F(1,76)¼ 22.77, p< .001, along with an accuracy� encoding task

interaction, F(1,76)¼ 8.46, p< .01. This impression-formation advantage was significant in separate ANOVAs for both

p(Hit), F(1,76)¼ 7.31, p< .01 and p(FAFill), F(1,76)¼ 6.29, p< .01.2

To discriminate sensitivity and response bias, we resorted to Snodgrass and Corwin’s (1988) two-high threshold model,

because the assumptions of parametric signal-detection analysis were not met and non-parametric measures of bias

estimates are very labile. In two-high threshold model, sensitivity simply amounts to the difference between hit rates and

false-alarm rates, which was already included in the reported ANOVAs. To estimate bias in this model, one simply has to

divide the false-alarm rate by 1 minus the sensitivity estimate. These bias estimates, which are also given in Table 1, were

indeed rather liberal (i.e., <.5). However, bias scores did not vary between experimental conditions. Both encoding

set� crime awareness ANOVAs—using p(FASusp) and p(FAFill) to estimate bias—yielded negligible encoding set main

effects, Fs< 1, and no significant effect at all.

Altogether, this pattern suggests the following interpretation: The superiority of the impression-formation condition

reflects a genuine advantage in discrimination performance. Moreover, the analysis of bias scores suggests that decision

strategies during recognition do not contribute to the impression-formation advantage. Figure 1 clearly reveals that the

reduction in false-alarm rates in the impression-formation condition is paralleled by a similarly strong increase in hit

rates—incompatible with a response-bias interpretation.3

EXPERIMENT 2

The findings of Experiment 1 support the idea that the superiority of impression formation over explicit memory

instructions extends to the eyewitness identification paradigm. However, the causal origin of this effect is not perfectly

2This double advantage of the impression formation condition in the identification of original targets and the rejection of fillers was not obtained for thoseline-ups from which the original targets were absent (i.e., in the analysis involving FASusp).3A 10-item NFC short scale (a¼ .65) was correlated weakly with the difference of hits and false alarms p(Hit)� p(FAFill), r¼�.19 (p< .10), suggestinga weak tendency high NFC participants to make premature identifications, this observation is independent of the encoding-task influence.


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clear. Ambiguity arises from the complex structure of the superior impression-formation condition, which confounds two

components that have not been disentangled in previous research. The ‘‘impression-formation’’ condition is defined by the

presence of an impression task and by the absence of an explicit memory task. In Experiment 2, we therefore concentrate

on this superior condition, and we examine whether the first or the second component, or maybe both, are responsible for

the basic effect. We followed the same general methodology as the first experiment, but decompose the complex

impression-formation condition into all possibilities:

(1) im

Copy

pression task presentþmemory set absent (old ‘‘impression-formation’’ condition);

(2) im
pression task presentþmemory set present;
(3) im
pression task absentþmemory set absent.
A testable premise of Experiment 2 is that Condition (1) replicates the basic results of the ‘‘impression-formation’’

condition obtained in Experiment 1. Granting this premise, the origin of the impression-formation advantage should then

be evident in planned contrasts against the other two Conditions (2) and (3). If (2) performs similarly well as (1) and better

than (3), then the causal origin can be located in the presence of an impression-formation task, rather than in the absence of

explicit memory instructions. If, however, (2) performs less well than (1) and (3), then the causal origin can be located in

the incidental memory format of Conditions (1) and (3), rather than impression formation per se. Of course, it is also

possible that the original Condition (1) exceeds both (2) and (3). In this case, enhanced performance would have to be

attributed to the conjunction of impression formation and incidental memory. However, theoretically, if enhanced memory

really reflects encoding depth, then one would expect the active impression-formation component to dominate the passive

incidental memory component. The major contrast should discriminate between equally high performance in Conditions

(1) and (2) and less performance in Condition (3). We did not include a fourth condition, impression task absentþmemory

set present, for which both accounts predict low performance, as already confirmed in Experiment 1.

Method

Participants and Design

Fifty-seven male and female participants were randomly assigned to three experimental groups: impression task present/

memory set absent; impression task present/memory set present; and impression task absent/memory set absent.

Materials

The same slide show and the same line-ups were used as in Experiment 1.

Procedure

The only modifications pertained to the encoding instructions and to the final recognition test, which included a confidence

rating (five-point rating scale from 1 to 5) after each line-up decision. Moreover, the presentation order of the eight line-ups

was randomized within each individual, rather than using only two constant presentation orders. Crime relevance was

never mentioned prior to encoding. The wording of the specific instructions was as follows:

The impression task present/memory set absent condition (I/NoM) was identical to the impression/posterior crime

condition of Experiment 1.

The same instruction was used for the impression task present/memory set present condition (I/M), with an explicit

memory instruction appended: ‘‘Please make also an attempt to memorize as many pictures as possible. Later on, you will

be presented a memory test.’’

right # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 793–807 (2009)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Figure 2. Mean identification rates (for Hits, FASusp, and FAFill) as a function of conditions in Experiment 2. I, impression; NoI, noimpression; M, memory; NoM, no memory


Instructions for the impression task absent/memory set absent condition (NoI/NoM) were also constructed from the

successful I/NoM instructions, but this time the impression-formation component was replaced by the following: ‘‘This

experiment is concerned with the influence of environmental factors on social perception.’’


Again, the empirical answer to the theoretical question is unambiguous and clear-cut. An inspection of the recognition

performance, summarized in Figure 2 and Table 2, points to the presence of an impression-formation task as the origin of

the memory advantage. While the hit rate for target-present panels exceeded the false-alarm rate (FASusp) for target-absent

panels in the two impression-formation conditions I/NoM, t(56)¼ 5.94, p< .001, and I/M, t(56)¼ 6.14, p< .001, the hit

rate did not exceed the false-alarm rate in the NoI/NoM condition, t(56)¼ 1.27, ns. A planned contrast of sensitivity,

p(Hit)� p(FASusp), corroborates the superiority of the former two combined impression-formation conditions (.51) over

the latter condition (.11), t(55)¼ 4.81, p< .001. An analogous contrast of the bias scores was not significant, t(51)¼ 1.22,

ns, although the bias was slightly less liberal after impression formation (cf. Table 2).

Analyses of the subjective confidence ratings that were included in Experiment 2 reflect the same impression-formation

advantage. Confidence was generally higher when panels included a real target rather than a distracter (M¼ 3.12 vs. 2.39

on a reverse scale), t(56)¼ 4.93, p< .001. Confidencewas also higher for I/NoM (2.79) and I/M (3.02) together (2.91) than

for NoI/NoM (2.48), t(55)¼ 2.52, p< .01. Confidence was only enhanced in the two impression-formation conditions

with a target present in a line-up, t(56)¼ 3.63, p< .001 (for I/NoM, I/M combined vs. NoI/NoM) but not for absent-target

line-ups, t(56)¼ 0.74, ns.

For an overall performance measure, we multiplied each participant’s confidence rating for each decision with a

correctness score (þ1¼ correct, �1¼ incorrect) and averaged the resulting products across all line-ups. Consistent with

Table 2. Average measures of recognition performance in Experiment 2 as a function of experimental conditions

Dependent measure


MemAbs ImprPres MemPres ImprPres MemAbs ImprAbs ImprPres total

p(Hit) .70 .64 .37 .67p(FASusp) .18 .14 .26 .16p(FAFill) .26 .25 .57 .25p(Hit)� p(FASusp) (sensitivity) .52 .50 .11 .51p(Hit)� p(FAFill) (sensitivity) .46 .50 �.20 .48BiasSusp .46 .37 .28 .42BiasFill .67 .51 .45 .59

Note: MemPres, MemAbs, ImprPres, ImprAbs refer to memory-present and memory-absent conditions, and to impression-present and impression-absentconditions, respectively.


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the other performance data, the resulting index of confident accuracy was higher for I/NoM (M¼ 1.42) and I/M (M¼ 1.52)

than for NoI/NoM (M¼ 0.91), as reflected in a significant t(55)¼ 4.99, p< .001. Interestingly, confident accuracy was

generally higher for line-ups in which the target was absent (M¼ 1.50) than for line-ups in which a target was present

(M¼ 0.58), t(56)¼ 2.84, p< .005. This difference was most pronounced in the NoI/NoM group (M¼ 1.11 vs.�0.72), and

somewhat less so in the I/NoM group (M¼ 1.47 vs. 1.36) and in the I/M group (M¼ 1.92 vs. 1.11).

For false alarms of the FAFill type, a similar pattern was obtained. In the I/NoM and I/M groups the identification rate for

original targets was clearly higher (.67) than the false-alarm rate for all fillers together (.25), yielding a difference of .42. In

contrast, for the NoI/NoM condition, the target identification rate was actually lower (.37) than the summed rate of falsely

identifying one of the four fillers (.57). Planned comparisons yielded the same significant contrasts as the preceding

analyses. Hit rates exceeded false-alarm rates in the I/NoM group, t(18)¼ 4.63, p< .001, and in the I/M group,

t(18)¼ 4.37, p< .001, whereas in the NoI/NoM group there were even more FAFill errors than hits, t(18)¼�2.14, p< .05.

The difference between hits and false alarms in the two impression conditions together was higher than in the NoI/NoM

condition, t(55)¼ 4.02, p< .001. An analogous test for the bias scores in the two encoding conditions revealed only a non-

significant increase from toward a less liberal bias, t(55)¼ 1.72 (cf. Table 2).

Altogether, these findings provide convergent validation for the interpretation that the encoding advantage observed in

the first two experiments originates in the impression task proper, rather than the absence of an explicit memory task or the

unawareness of an ongoing crime. Again, the resulting improvement is manifested in a genuine advantage in

discrimination ability, but not in a shift toward a stricter response bias. Figure 2 clearly reveals that although the false-

alarm rates go down after impression formation, the hit rates show a similar increase.

EXPERIMENT 3

While it is important to understand the nature of encoding influences on eyewitness performance, from a practical point of

view, they can hardly be undone or changed at the time of retrieval, immediately before the line-up. Nevertheless, one may

even think of possible ways of influencing witness performance even at the time of retrieval. In a last experiment, we

examined the impact of two relevant treatments immediately before the line-up. First, we examined whether forming a late

impression immediately before the identification task can also influence the witness’ performance. Logically, such a

treatment can hardly strengthen the representation of the original faces and can therefore not increase the genuine

discrimination ability. However, maybe it might at least help to induce a stricter criterion and thereby to reduce the false-

alarm rate.

Secondly, we manipulated a factor that might even influence the accuracy of discriminating original targets from

recognition foils. In legal practice, one factor that has been shown to improve eyewitness memory after the fact is the

cognitive interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1988), which prescribes an interview style that facilitates the reconstruction of

the embedding context of the original event to be remembered. Elements of the cognitive interview may generalize from

its home domain, verbal reports (Centofanti & Reece, 2006; Fisher, Geiselman, & Amador, 1989; Memon & Higham,

1999), to identification tasks. By analogy, the treatment we included consisted of a list of questions about all kinds of

contextual details. We tentatively suggested that performance might improve this way. If so, however, the benefits of

recontextualizing retrieval (cf. Bekerian, Dennet, Hill, & Hitchcock, 1992; Hammond, Wagstaff, & Cole, 2006) should

reflect a process quite different from the encoding advantage of impression formation, which relies on decontextualizing of

the target becoming a distinct entity with clear boundaries.

Methods

Participants and Design

Eighty male and female participants were recruited at the University of Heidelberg and at the Police Academy

(Hochschule fur Polizei) Villingen-Schwenningen. They only received a sweet. Participants were randomly assigned to


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one of four groups resulting from the orthogonal variation of two factors, impression formation (present vs. absent) and

context reconstruction (present vs. absent).

Materials and Procedure

The basic task setting resembled the one used for the first two experiments, but the materials and procedures differed in

some notable respects. First, a video film rather than a slide show provided the stimulus information. Participants were

asked to take the role of a taxi driver waiting for a customer in front of a house. A number of people, seven altogether,

walked out of the house down the stairway through the garden, before the ultimate person finally addressed the driver ‘‘I

have called the taxi.’’ Prior to the presentation of the video film, participants neither received impression-formation

instructions nor explicit memory instructions. They were merely told to consider the people in the film carefully, because a

subsequent task would pertain to these persons. After they had seen the film, they engaged in a filler task for about

15minutes (i.e., a decision-making experiment involving hotel choices).

Each participant again had to complete eight line-ups, in four of which an original target was present. The other four

line-ups included distracters in the same filler context. In this experiment, line-ups included as many as eight persons,

rendering the task rather difficult and inducing reluctance to identify one particular person. Immediately before the

recognition test, participants were told that the situation they had watched from their taxi has become relevant for a

criminal investigation, and they were asked to serve as an eyewitness. In the housewhere they had waited some 2500s hadbeen stolen and, apparently, the thief could be among the persons they had seen. Depending on the experimentalcondition, they were then subjected to the following instruction manipulations.

In the impression-formation present conditions, they were asked to scan their memory for the persons they had seen and

to select the four persons they had found most likeable.

In the no impression-formation conditions, they were also asked to scan their memory but only to consider four selected

faces before their mind’s eye.

In the context-reconstruction conditions, they were instructed to try to remember what kind of day it was, what the

weather was like, the light conditions, when they were waiting in front of the house. They were encouraged to recall the

garden, how they experienced it, the colors, the gate, the number of stairs, the wall of the car port, the bells next to the door,

and a number of other details. Moreover, they were asked to re-establish their own thoughts, perceptions and feelings,

prompted by the following questions: How did you do while waiting before the house? What thoughts came to your mind?

What did you feel? Listen to your memory and try to remember what reactions the situation solicited in yourself.

In the no context-reconstruction conditions, this part was omitted.

The position of the eight persons within line-ups was counterbalanced systematically, and five different orderings of the

eight line-ups were used and roughly equally distributed over the experimental groups. As there were several targets to be

recognized, participants could identify more than one person in a line-up, but they rarely did so. No confidence ratings

were included. For convenience, only first-response data are reported. Analyzing all responses yielded very little,

negligible differences.


Table 3 summarizes the mean performance indices as a function of experimental conditions. Given the large number of

eight persons per panel, the false-alarm rate of the FASusp type (i.e., the likelihood of identifying exactly one innocent

suspect) was generally very low (i.e., under 5%). Thus, increased panel size is an appropriate means of reducing the false-

alarm rate (cf. Wells, 2001). However, the large number of fillers resulted in many identifications of the p(FAFill) type.

Given the high proportion of zero false-alarm rates in one measure and false-alarm rates exceeding hit rates in the other, we

refrained from signal-detection analyses. We only included hits versus false alarms as a repeated-measures factor, along

with the two between-subjects factors, impression and recontextualization, in three-factorial ANOVAs.

In the analysis with p(Hit) versus p(FASusp) as repeated-measures factor, only the main effect for this accuracy factor

was significant, F(1,76)¼ 80.35, p< .001, neither the impression nor the recontextualization factor. This makes sense,


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Table 3. Average measures of recognition performance in Experiment 3 as a function of experimental conditions

Dependent measure


No recontext.impression

No recontext.no impression

Recontextual.impression

Recontextual. noimpression

p(Hit) .25 .26 .29 .38p(FASusp) .03 .05 .03 .05p(FAFill) .28 .45 .24 .28p(Hit) only focused .08 .18 .10 .18p(FASusp) only focused .00 .01 .00 .03p(FAFill) only focused .05 .11 .10 .11


because these two factors were manipulated after the memory formation process and could therefore not affect

discrimination proper.

However, in the ANOVA with the p(Hit) versus p(FAFill) factor, which should be sensitive to a stricter identification

threshold, an influence could be reasonably expected. Indeed, the recontextualization treatment led to better

discrimination, as evident in a target-presence� recontextualization interaction, F(1,76)¼ 4.26, p< .05. Furthermore,

individual p(hits)� p(FAFill) difference scores correlated positively with expert ratings of the number (r¼ .26, p< .10)

and the quality (r¼ .33, p< .05) of the responses generated during the recontextualization treatment. No accuracy main

effect emerged in this analysis, due to inflated p(FAFill) rates that were at least as high as the hit rates given the eight-person

line-ups.

Interestingly, a main effect for impression formation at retrieval, F(1,76)¼ 5.26, p< .05, reflects a general decrease in

identification rate (from .34 to .26) after impression formation, regardless of whether a target is present in a panel or not,

suggesting a stricter decision criterion.

When the analysis was confined to the recognition of those four target persons that participants had chosen for the

impression task (according to the participant’s later self-report), the decreased identification rate after impression

formation not only emerged in the FAFill ANOVA, F(1,76)¼ 5.48, p< .05, but also for FASusp, F(1,76)¼ 7.64, p< .05.4,5

Thus, the liberal response bias that normally misleads eyewitnesses to produce too many false alarms could indeed be

reduced to some degree through post hoc impression formation.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

What do the present findings add to what has been known all along about the influence of impression formation on

incidental person memory?—The first answer is that we have seen an old person memory paradigm to carry over to the

applied area of eyewitness identification. Although the impact of encoding conditions on eyewitness memory was studied

intensively (cf.Wells & Olsen, 2003), the superiority of impression formation over an explicit memory set was hardly ever

considered in the eyewitness paradigm. Taking up this neglected issue, Experiment 1 confirmed that impression formation

indeed increases the accuracy in the identification paradigm, just as memory for verbally presented behavior descriptions

profits from encoding instructions that call for impression formation rather than explicit memory.

However, beyond replication and carry-over to another paradigm, the reported findings impose constraints on the

theoretical explanation of the underlying cognitive process. One theoretical purpose of the present research was to

disentangle the two aspects that have been traditionally confounded in the double-barreled juxtaposition of impression

formation versus explicit memory instructions. The aim of Experiment 2 was to figure out which of these confounded

aspects causes the encoding advantage, the presence of an impression-formation task or the absence of an intentional

4As in Experiment 1, individual NFC scores (a¼ .72) correlated negatively but non-significantly with the difference of hits and false alarms, p(FAFill),r¼�.19, p< .10. High NFC participants were slightly less successful in refraining from a premature identification response.5The genuine discrimination effect for the recontextualization treatment is no longer apparent in the reduced data for the few targets focused duringimpression formation.


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memory set. The empirical answer could not have been more clear-cut. The advantage was due to the presence of an

impression-formation task. The superiority of impression formation was also independent of the awareness about whether

a crime was going on, and of related affect or arousal.

Notably, though not surprisingly, analyses of hits and false alarms indicated that impression formation during encoding

actually increases the sensitivity of eyewitness memory proper, as distinguished from a mere response bias during

retrieval. In fact, an impression-formation encoding set was apparent in both increased hit rates and decreased false-alarm

rates. The enhanced sensitivity that resulted from an impression-formation encoding set did not come along with a marked

conservative shift in response bias. Nevertheless, in Experiment 3, there was some indication of a criterion shift induced

through impression formation at the time of retrieval, which could hardly affect the memory representation proper.

The present findings suggest that the scope and generality of the impression-formation advantage may be broader than

expected. Prior research on memory for verbally presented person attributes or behavior descriptions was interpreted to

mean that impression formation is only an effective mnemonic under high cognitive effort and unrestricted resources (cf.

Macrae et al., 1993). In the present setting, there were only a few seconds for eyewitnesses to form impressions of several

persons; effort expenditure was low and there were no conflicting, inconsistent items to be integrated. A less restrictive

interpretation of the impression-formation advantage is compatible with evidence from face memory that even under low-

effort conditions there is hardly any better mnemonic for faces than likeability judgments (Bower & Karlin, 1974; Sporer,

1991).

Thus, even after almost three decades of pertinent research, elaboration on the impression-formation advantage still

promises to be theoretically fruitful. Does an evaluative encoding set, driven by likeability and personal evaluations, also

improve academic learning and other memory tasks? Might this advantage be related to the self-reference effect? What is

the relation between the impression-formation advantage and the often-noted advantage of implicit learning? Can other

encoding operations play a similar role for memory in general and for eyewitness accuracy in particular? And last but not

the least, what cognitive activities at the time of identification may optimize the retrieval of memories based on specific

encoding sets? The tentative results of Experiment 3 suggest that recontextualizing the observational context can enhance

the accuracy immediately before the memory test, consistent with the facilitative influence of context reconstruction on

verbal eyewitness reports (Hammond et al., 2006). Retrospective impressions formed at the time of retrieval were at least

effective in reducing the false-alarm rate, due to a stricter response criterion. Future research should provide systematic

answers to these and other intriguing questions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Helpful comments on a draft of this paper by Siegfried L. Sporer, Florian Kutzner, Michaela Wanke, and Leonel Garcia-

Marques are gratefully acknowledged.

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