The Impact Of Stress On Memory: Does Arousal Timing Affect Individual Susceptibility To Misinformation?

The misinformation effect, or the idea that information introduced after an event can change the memory for that event, has been studied for many decades. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether arousal introduced during the reconsolidation period has a different effect than arousal introduced just prior to retrieval. The study followed a misinformation procedure where participants were shown a series of slide show images documenting an event followed by a written narrative about the event that contains misinformation and finally a memory test 24 hours later. At different intervals in this procedure, I induced arousal through a timed arithmetic stress task: one-third of the participants will perform the stress task immediately after the introduction of misinformation; one third will perform the stress task just before the memory test; the final third will not perform the stress task. While few statistically significant effects were found, participants in both stress conditions were more susceptible to misinformation than the control group, and participants were more likely to choose the misinformation than the novel foil. Due to high attrition rates, strong conclusions could not be drawn.