Honors College Faculty Member Dr. Julie Earles Conducts Research into Memory and Eyewitness Testimony

Jupiter, FL (Feb. 1, 2010) - Dr. Julie Earles, Associate Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University’s Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, is currently studying how people successfully form, store, and retrieve memories, and the circumstances in which our memory systems fail. The main application of her research is in eyewitness reports to criminal events. As anyone can imagine, memory failure is especially an issue when it comes to these reports. “There are many examples of people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes based on false eyewitness memory, yet too often in our court system we still place a great deal of weight on the testimony of confident eyewitnesses,” said Dr. Earles.

            Dr. Earles is interested in figuring out why eyewitnesses make errors. In her lab, she and her students have test subjects watch movies that contain actors performing various actions. They ask the participants to try to remember who performs which action in film clips they have seen.  Later, Dr. Earles and her students test the memory of the participants.  They show the participants three basic types of events. Old events are exactly like the ones they saw before.  New events contain an actor that they have never seen before performing an action that they have never seen before.  Conjunction events contain an actor that they saw before performing an action that they saw before but that had previously been performed by someone else.  A “yes” response to a conjunction event would represent what is called a “binding error” in memory.  “This is the type of memory error that often occurs with eyewitnesses to a crime. The eyewitness remembers the crime and remembers the accused person, but incorrectly binds the person with a crime that was actually performed by someone else,” said Dr. Earles.
            “In the lab, we manipulate conditions to determine when and how these binding errors occur.  We have found, for example, that if people are distracted or are under time pressure when making a response, they tend to make eyewitness errors.  But these errors occur because of difficulties remembering the actor and the action, not because of an influence of distraction or time pressure on the binding of actors with their actions. We have also discovered that while people are more likely to remember criminal actions than non criminal actions, they are just as likely to make binding errors with criminal events as with non criminal events.
            The potential of this research is immeasurable.  Nevertheless, Dr. Earles has increased the impact of her studies even more by including a number of Florida Atlantic University undergraduate students as her research partners.  She has co-authored articles with several of these students and, each spring, in the Research Symposium conducted by Wilkes Honors College students, the discoveries begun by Dr. Earles’ research team are presented to the public.  As dean of the Wilkes Honors College, Dr. Jeffrey Buller, said “We put a premium on significant, peer-reviewed research that enables undergraduate students to work closely with an accomplished faculty mentor.  And that’s just the type of research that Dr. Earles is doing.”  All of which suggests that there is one thing that easy to remember: Tomorrow’s important discoveries are being made by faculty members and students at FAU’s Wilkes Honors College today.

byline: Tamara Howard